[JMI]

A solid recommendation, as I believe Britedream was the ultimate source of much of the unpacking information I have reported here. I've downloaded your target, and, time permitting, will take a quick look at the unpacking issues. May I recommend that you not only read the tuts you've downloaded, but that you start making your own set of compiled notes on features of various versions of your protector targets.

For example, you could start collecting the patterns of stolen bytes reported and discovered. You could start recording patterns of code found at or around the stolen bytes. You could start studying, from the trace, the patterns from the ASPR DLL. For example the Huge loop at the start of the program which is followed by another loop which seems to match the number of times you passed an exception with F9 and/or SHIFT+F9; that your OEP is probably sitting naked in the trace, if you only know where to look and that it probably is listed in the trace in a PUSH DWORD PTR DS:[ADDRESS] instruction a couple of instructions above the PUSHAD and PUSHFD which occur shortly before the REP STOS BYTE PTR ES:[EDI] routine to erase all the code that got you there in the first place. In other words, the run trace is worth close study because it is the track of ASPR's unfolding of the path to the OEP.

Understanding what it's doing will help with the next target and you might note the differences you discover in the general pattern. In this effort it really helps to remove all the loop code repeats, simply noting the registers going into the start of the loop and coming out.

Once you get comfortable with the unpacking, you then have to move on to the issue of whether or not their is additional code in the target which has to be changed to make it actually run fully. But for the first step, you just want to master manual unpacking and then worry about the next phase.

ferrari: I've downloaded Britedream's tut both here and from somewhere else and, for some reason, I'm not seeing the illustrations. Yours has the first two only, and the other one I downloaded didn't have any. Maybe I'm just using the wrong file to open it. It's opening in Word and it's time to try something else.

Regards,