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title should be "how to crack any hello world"

In mid 80s, I cracked with this method a printer driver file on an Olivetti Computer to work with a complete other printer manufacturer and it was working. That was for a company of the father of a school friend and my first earned money with computer programming.

I started doing this as a 14 year old way back in the 80s (made a partial career out of it). Cracking I started cracking copy protected games and later cad cam programs that I couldn’t afford as an EE student and I liked to have them for learning and schematic and pcb design at home. So I hacked the dongle protection out of it.

I started by hacking cheats into video games (I’ve many videos on that). Until I had a  Game that I’d copied and didn’t start. Copy protection… that became my first crack.
So the jne (jump not equal) screamed out to me, instantly.
You could also change the test eax,eax to xor eax,eax is also two bytes and sets the ZF=1

Now the test eax,eax is a bit of a weird one . But it comes down to the fact that strncmp returns 0, when equal. So test 0,0 equals 0 and so it sets the ZF.

You've also uncovered how to inject code into binaries and get it to execute. This is why having digitally signed files is so important and never trust files from unofficial sources.

Just a hint: In the disassembly you see the number after the jump instruction (does not matter which). As example: "75 0e" at address 1204. The second number, "0e" in this case, is the amount of bytes to jump over. The assembly code means "jne 1214". If you add the value "0e" as a byte count (offset) to the address of the next command at 1206 (the instruction pointer is at this address after reading and before the execution of the jump command), then you get 1214, which is the destination address. Then you could change the command to "jne 1206" or "75 00", to land on the same address, either if "ZF" (Zero Flag) is zero or not. I hope, this helps you to understand this kind of jump commands better.

You surely could also replace the jump command with "nop nop" or "90 90". (No Operation). Two are required, because it's a 1 byte command to replace a 2 byte command.

Probably one could train a llm model to understand machine code or assembly code. Then it should be possible for it, to crack any software.

The biggest issue with reverse engineering a large piece of software is the sheer amount of code you have to review. However, if you can single step or set breakpoints, you can figure out what sections of code does what. Ultimately, anything that has to make a decision about access is just a branch, and you can overwrite that instruction. Whatever you do to try to protect against this can be overcome in the same way.
Most modern programmers don't have a clue what's actually going on deep down. Having grown up with the very first Microprocessors, this stuff is second nature.

Great video!
Something worth exploring would be DLL injection, since codebases get increasingly more complex and abstract (JIT code, obfuscation, many libraries) and editing values at runtime through injected code is something that is not often explained very well.
Plus, on Linux there are almost no videos on the LD_PRELOAD and DLL injection topic in general.

Shared knowledge is always appreciated.

I like the style of the videos you make...very laid back and raw...feels like Im there with you learning together🎉

Hi,Daniel! I really enjoy your videos .Like watching them in educational way.Keep moving and improving

Nice video, I liked the way you explained and showed what everything does as well as breaking down the process.

I know English isn't your first language but the way you spoke slowly and clearly made it really easy for me to follow and understand what was happening without having to rewind the video all the time and look up things myself. (Your English is very good by the way!)

You explained the process and your thoughts the same way someone trying to learn would be going through which was really excellent.

A lot of other videos either assume you know everything already or just go through everything really quickly and don't explain what anything does and I never learn or remember anything.

Back in the 80s-90s, we were using norton utilities disk editor to cheat a pc game or crack a program 🙂

for some reason I had the patience to watch the entire 30 minutes, probably because you are doing it live and vocalising your thought process, and no knowledge is needed to follow, so there's room for the viewer to guess what is next

Thank you man, This is the first video from all the re videos i watched to understand something.

This is exactly the system a friend of mine used to get Lightwave running on an Amiga 2000 without the Video Toaster. There was an if that had been flipped, and magically we had Lightwave in Italy without the Video Toaster. We changed one byte, maybe just a single bit. It was the early 1990s.

how is this channel not more popular is beyond me. keep up the good work!

the simplicity/efficiency of the unix shell concept is once again demonstrated , thanks for sharing your toughts sir , i spent a  real cool moment watching this !

i remember doing that in while i was young, succefully cracked many software and games (no cd crack) at the time, the methode i used is to replace the password check condition with "NOP" no operation code 90 in the assembler... thanks for the video

I like the way you learn lively understand on cam, that extra benefits for us, as how a hacker search for resources and learn❤