General Cracking FAQ

[miele]

What is reverse engineering?
Reverse engineering is the art breaking a program down into little pieces (in a matter of speaking of course) and learn to know how it works. Recoding is a form of reverse engineering and means having a program behave the way you want it to behave. This is done by altering (re-coding) the program. As the source code is not available, the executable file itself needs to be altered. This file consists out of low-level-code, also known as assembly language which can be interpreted by the processor. This is why understanding assembler is so important to crackers/reversers.
Cracking is a form of reverse engineering.
Cracking generally has a negative undertone because it is sometimes used to avoid or to get round protections in programs imposed by the creator of the program. But this does not necessarily has to be the case. Cracking can also be used to add functionalities to programs of which you don’t have the source code. Most of times it is then not called cracking but recoding (as mentioned above). So, as you can see the line between cracking and recoding (reversing) is very thin.


What is cracking? What is the difference with reverse engineering?
See topic What is reverse engineering?


I want to learn how to crack/reverse. How do I start?
Let me tell you this first. There is no easy-out-of-the-box way to start cracking or reverse engineering. Everybody that knows the art followed a different route. But what they all had to do when they started off was: reading, practicing and studying. That, together with a fair deal of determination can learn how to reverse.