This is satire, right?

"A plaintext file requires a special tool, called a text editor, to change its content."

"I recommend notepad.exe or pico. Linux hackers may use WINE to run notepad.exe." [rofl]

EDIT: I think it's just the author's sense of humor, not actually satire.

That's an interesting anti-pirating technique... Demonstrate how to crack your own licensing, while at the same time adding a backdoor to make users conflate the two. Obviously, all cracked versions of his software have backdoors in them...

Except his attack is valid against all unsigned binaries... even his own. He could be distributing a backdoor and not even be aware of it...

That's brilliant. Make it as easy as possible for "cracked" versions of your product to contain malicious back doors, thus encouraging people to avoid the cracked copies and pay for a properly licensed one.

This is really funny - but the content shows the author's dedication to teaching (and learning) penetration techniques, even when it involves his own software. I would imagine that losing potential customers isn't a concern because the kind of people buying this software (generally) wouldn't run pirated versions. So instead, it makes a cool demo. Very cool, raffi.

Good means of exercising damage control...

"The cracked versions are backdoored! Use official release to be safe."

I've actually wondered if the cracked versions of Photoshop tend to have backdoors... and with the recent articles on the NSA, if the NSA itself is trying to put out the most popular cracked versions. I mean, if there's a single piece of software that is more pirated, I don't know what it is. They probably have more sophisticated ways, but you never know.

That's why I am of a firm belief that if you are going to pirate software, at least have the common decency to crack it your self and NOT REDISTRIBUTE.

On a side note I am amazed that more developers do not sign their own code with checksums and alteration verification routines. Sign your software, then do a runtime check if the code has been altered. If so, after few hours of use, present the user with a nice message:

"Congratulations, you have a cracked copy of our software. We find it sad that you did not want to buy it from us. It's possible that we may starve as a result. In any case, we would like you to stop using this copy. To encourage you to do so we are going to begin now uploading the contents of your hard drive to our servers. You may stop this process at any time by closing the program and removing it from your computer. Thank you."

This would seem like the perfect tactic if the software also has a quiet phone-home system built in that contacts the author if the file checksums don't match. I bet you could get interesting statistics on how many people would try this method after publishing such an article.

That entitled attitude of the complainer is so familiar. Hate that shit.

What if the software requires an internet connection to dial back home & verify the software authenticity .. say once every 30 days? Is that too annoying for users?

shell.sl? Is this a dialect of Smalltalk?

Why is he root on his own machine when he uses unzip?

I hope this is satire. "The unzip tool uses a sophisticated algorithm based on LZ77 and Huffman coding". Oh wow. Who would have thought. " These files do not represent the socio-economic status of the code." Oh.

Lame humor.

This DRM just turns things into an arms race, and eventually makes your software seem more and more like malware.

A non-game example off the top of my head is Milkshape 3d, a basic modelling software that was popular in the early 00s because it had importers and exporters for the games that were wildly popular then such as Counter-Strike.

The teenagers using it had no money to pay for the full version, so cracking of it was rife. Eventually the "anti-piracy" mechanisms built into it by the author got crazy enough that the program was essentially broken.

I can't really remember specifics, except that it crashed your computer (!) if you tried to use a certain app-sniffing software.

I've cracked games, for lives, and so on, since I was about 14 years old. Then later I used to turn "demo" versions of PC-software into full versions and the vast majority of all the programs I attacked were trivial to defeat.

People tend to only add in the protection at the last minute; rather than making it an integral part of the code.

I only ever came up against a few programs that I couldn't hack. It genuinely became easier when people would use an off-the-shelf "protect my program" toolkit; crack one and you'd cracked all programs using that family of protection.

It was rare that I couldn't register demo/eval copies of programs. Sure I know assembly, and used SoftIce, but we're talking about a random guy in his late teens/early twenties who mostly learned by trial and error with random hints from +fravia.

(ObRandom: I know it must be a pain as a developer, but the best way to stop people cracking your demo is literally to have two binaries. Genuinely don't compile "file:save" or whatever feature you're keeping for paid users, into your demo version. Sure this will stop instant registration, and it won't stop somebody from leaking a full version, but it will absolutely stop the majority of attacks.)

That's completely pointless. If a cracker is able to remove the license check he will also be able to remove your checksum verification.

Putting yourself in a difficult legal position on top of it helps no one.

Ok, to be clear, the uploading of the hard drive content is a joke. I would not suggest you actually do it for legal and ethical reasons. As for DRM, I think Total Commander is a good example of good software protection in action. When I was a kid and could not afford to buy it, I tried to crack it a few times, with no luck. Nowadays, I own a copy, but just for fun I tried to crack it a few times, for educational purposes :), and still could not. If you are interested, take a look at it, I think TC has a very non intrusive DRM that works well but is not draconian. Of course, you can still grab a stollen key for it from any torrent site, but to my knowledge at least no one has cracked it yet.

Please do not follow this advice.

I think it's quite obvious that the author is very well aware of how to implement DRM in such a way that it can't be circumvented, but it easily enters the territory of whether or not he would actually gain users from it.

Cobalt Strike isn't exactly a $100 copy of Office - potential users who are going to use it to its full extent are going to be willing to pay the steep cost of entry as it is.

In other words, while it would be possible to guard against piracy, the end result wouldn't be more sales of Cobalt Strike.

I can only speak for my observations in the gaming community and there are more or less two camps, which can be summarized as:

No back-dialing, ever. Basically they do not want the company to have a remote-switch to disable the software after they've buyed it, do not want the risk to not be able to play a game anymore just because a company decided to put down the servers and want to be able to play everywhere without an internet connection (e.g. I sit at my laptop and cannot play your singleplayer game because you decided to need dial-back? No chance.)

The other camp doesn't care about it, more or less. Sure, they would like it if there was no dial-back for the games, but it doesn't hinder them from still buying and playing at platforms/games that require this as long as their playing experience isn't dimished by it. Steam is more or less the platform of choice for the second camp and seems to be growing all the time, so most users probably would acccept an dial-back connection once, every 30 days or even at every start. Quick note: Always-On is still something which is considered off-limits. Ubisoft tried it various times with their games and fell flat on the face. They've backpaddled to activate once by now.

That kind of DRM technique was broken a half decade ago. If your software calls home, a cracker can record/simulate that behavior if needed.

The result in the end then becomes that pirates will still use the software, but people without a stable Internet connection can't use your software.

It also ads a problem for businesses. Suddenly, they need to poke holes into VPN's, and risk that the software will also become unusable if their Internet connection ever become a problem (lets hope they don't plan to draw fiber). The millions of military personal will also be unlikely customers, as their Internet connectivity in the field is not know for it up-time.