Cracking is the process of breaking down the security issues or protection methods of a system. When cracking is concerned with software, it is called Software Cracking. Cracking can break copy prevention. The serial numbers, hardware keys, passwords etc. can also be found out by cracking. The people who do these kinds of activities are called Crackers. Apple II and Commodore64 are the first copy protection software. The software crackers are successful in breaking the copy protection and it is considered to be an illegal task.
Crackers need to have a strong knowledge to crack these protections. Cracking is an illegal process but, the distributions of the copies that are cracked are termed to be most illegal by the lawsuits. Now-a-days, all software comes with copy protection, but defeating the protection involves individual’s knowledge to experiment on it and crack it. So, the crackers are skilled people who use their knowledge in illegal aspects. The United States have passed, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), to make software cracking and distribution of cracked information as illegal. In May 2001, The European Union passed The European Copyright Detective to make cracking illegal. Cracking is done by modifying the application in binary and preventing the key in program’s execution. With the help of the debugger, the cracker can reach the subroutine which contains the protection code. Now, the binary can be modified in a way it can replace the opcode with its NOP opcode, which skips the subroutine to be executed.
Many sites are available to download cracks for games and other applications. Cracking makes the software to operate fully without protection. This is concerned as the worst part, as the effort of building that software is broken by someone effortlessly. So, the companies use copy protection in such a way that the information becomes corruptive once it is cracked. To solve these issues, the companies also provide a way to correct the damage in software, if the customer is ready to pay for it and get the un cracked licensed software.
