Hack Software and Run the Trial Program Forever

When these softwares are installed for the first time, they make an entry into the Windows Registry with the details such as Installed Date and Time, installed path etc. After installation every time you run the software, it compares the current system date and time with the installed date and time. 


So, with this it can make out whether the trial period is expired or not. So with this being the case, just manually changing the system date to an earlier date will not solve the problem. For this purpose there is a small Tool known as RunAsDate. RunAsDate is a small utility that allows you to run a program in the date and time that you specify. This utility doesn’t change the current system date, but it only injects the date/time that you specify into the desired application. 

RunAsDate intercepts the kernel API calls that returns the current date and time (GetSystemTime, GetLocalTime, GetSystemTimeAsFileTime), and replaces the current date/time with the date/time that you specify. It works with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.

NOTE: FOLLOW THESE TIPS CAREFULLY

You have to follow these tips carefully to successfully hack a software and make it run in it’s trial mode forever.

1. Note down the date and time, when you install the software for the first time.
2. Once the trial period expires, you must always run the software using RunAsDate.
3. After the trial period is expired, do not run the software(program) directly. If you run the software directly even once, this hack may no longer work.
4. It is better and safe to inject the date of the last day in the trial period .

For example, if the trial period expires on jan 30 2009, always inject the date as jan 29 2009 in the RunAsDate. I hope this helps! Please express your experience and opinions through comments.

How to Make a Trojan Horse(virus)

Most of you may be curious to know about how to make a Trojan or Virus on your own. Here is an answer for your curiosity. In this post I’ll show you how to make a simple Trojan on your own using C programming language. This Trojan when executed will eat up the hard disk space on the root drive (The drive on which Windows is installed, usually C: Drive) of the computer on which it is run. Also this Trojan works pretty quickly and is capable of eating up approximately 1 GB of hard disk space for every minute it is run. So, I’ll call this as Space Eater Trojan. Since this Trojan is written using a high level programming language it is often undetected by antivirus. The source code for this Trojan is available for download at the end of this post. Let’s see how this Trojan works…

Before I move to explain the features of this Trojan you need to know what exactly is a Trojan horse and how it works. As most of us think a Trojan or a Trojan horse is not a virus. In simple words a Trojan horse is a program that appears to perform a desirable function but in fact performs undisclosed malicious functions that allow unauthorized access to the host machine or create a damage to the computer.

Now lets move to the working of our Trojan

The Trojan horse which I have made appears itself as an antivirus program that scans the computer and removes the threats. But in reality it does nothing but occupy the hard disk space on the root drive by just filling it up with a huge junk file. The rate at which it fills up the hard disk space it too high. As a result the the disk gets filled up to 100% with in minutes of running this Trojan. Once the disk space is full, the Trojan reports that the scan is complete. The victim will not be able to clean up the hard disk space using any cleanup program. This is because the Trojan intelligently creates a huge file in the Windows\System32 folder with the .dll extension. Since the junk file has the .dll extention it is often ignored by disk cleanup softwares. So for the victim, there is now way to recover the hard disk space unless reformatting his drive.

The algorithm of the Trojan is as follows.

 1. Search for the root drive

 2. Navigate to WindowsSystem32 on the root drive.

3. Create the file named “spceshot.dll”.

4. Start dumping the junk data onto the above file and keep increasing it’s size until the drive is full.

5. Once the drive is full, stop the process.

You can download the Trojan source code HERE. Please note that I have not included the executabe for security reasons. You need to compile it to obtain the executable.

How to compile, test and remove the damage?

Compilation:

For step-by-step compilation guide, refer my post How to compile C Programs.

Testing:

To test the Trojan,  just run the SpaceEater.exe file on your computer. It’ll generate a warning message at the beginning. Once you accept it, the Trojan runs and eats up hard disk space.

 NOTE: To remove the warning message you’ve to edit the source code and then re-compile it.

 How to remove the Damage and free up the space?

 To remove the damage and free up the space, just type the following in the “run” dialog box.

%systemroot%\system32

Now search for the file “spceshot.dll“. Just delete it and you’re done. No need to re-format the hard disk.

 NOTE: You can also change the ICON of the virus to make it look like a legitimate program. This method is described in the post: How to Change the ICON of an EXE file ?

Please pass your comments and tell me your opinion. I am just waiting for your comments…

 

Display Legal Notice on Startup of your Windows

if your PC has multiple users then you can now display legal notice to every user before they login to your PC. 
This legal notice will be displayed at every startup just before the Desktop is loaded. Using this you can tell your friends about the do’s and dont’s in your computer when they login in your absence. 
Well you can do this pretty easily. For this there is one small registry hack. Here is the step-by-step instruction to do this.



1. Go to Start->Run, type regedit and hit ENTER .
2. Navigate to the following key in the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \policies\system On the right side pane look for “legalnoticecaption“, double click on  it and enter the desired Legal Notice Caption.
3. Next below this look for “legalnoticetext” and enter the desired Legal Notice Text. The legal notice text can be up to a page in it’s size so that it can include a set of do’s and dont’s for your computer.
4. After you do this just restart your computer and upon the next startup you can see the legal notice information for your computer. This trick works on both XP and Vista. You can also try it on Windows 7 and should work with no problems.

Hope you like this post. Pass your comments.