Love these stories. 20 years ago I encountered ArtMoney for the first time, 18 years ago I copied a C# aimbot from patrickssj6(?), all the way to now… Game hacking, especially through the growth and advancement of modern tech, will teach you so many things.

Can you read all of these without your blood pressure rising? “load-bearing”, “golden path”, “golden files”, “golden artifacts”, “golden smoke tests”, “provenance”, “honest take”, “belt and suspenders”, “that’s the unlock”, “smoking gun”, “that’s not a bug, it’s a feature of the design”, “X isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom”, “not because X, but because Y”, “X, Y, but not Z. Sometimes W”, “X isn’t just Y anymore”, “no longer just X”, “less about X, more about Y”, “not X so much as Y”, “X, but for Y”, “load-bearing <literally anything>”, “the wrong shape”, “the same shape as”, “shaped like a”, “a config file in a trenchcoat”, “vibes in a trenchcoat”, “three functions in a trenchcoat”, “a spreadsheet in a trenchcoat”, “literally anything in a trenchcoat”, “this test is doing a lot of work”, “that comma is doing a lot of work”, “real work”, “the word 'should' is doing a lot of heavy lifting”, “this abstraction is earning its keep”, “this function pulls its weight”, “the duplication is load-bearing, not loose”, “the coupling is intentional, not accidental”, “the seam between”, “cutting along the seam”, “a natural seam”, “the grain of the codebase”, “against the grain of the API”, “the codebase wants to (wants to WHAT?)”, “the type system is telling you”, “dead code walking”, “zombie config”, “the function outlived its purpose”, “the name no longer matches the behavior”, “the compiler is trying to tell you”, “listen to what the code is telling you”, “the tests are screaming”, “this code smells like”, “the blast radius of this”, “the gravity of the module”, “orbiting the real issue”, “dancing around the actual fix”, “the fix is hiding in plain sight”, “the bug was hiding in”, “the quiet part”, “saying the quiet part out loud”, “half right, and the half that (more clanker rambling)”, “quietly load-bearing”, “quietly doing the heavy lifting”, “silently holding everything together”, “held together with hope”, “held together by convention”, “one refactor away from collapse”, “a Jenga tower of dependencies”, “a house of cards”, “the workaround became the architecture”, “the hack calcified”, “fossilized decisions”, “archaeological layers of the codebase”, “code archaeology”, “git blame archaeology”, “the sediment of past decisions”, “scar tissue in the X”, “the codebase has memory”, “the ghosts of a previous design”, “the foundation is sand”, “built on quicksand”, “the scaffolding became the building”, “haunted by an old abstraction”, “the vestigial parameter”, “an appendix of the API”, “the map has drifted from the territory”, “the docs are fan fiction at this point”, “the README is aspirational”, “the comment is a lie waiting to happen”, “the type signature is a promise the function doesn’t keep”, “the interface writes a check the implementation can’t cash”, “actually let me”, “actually let me”, “actually let me”, “actually let me”, “actually I think”, “actually let me”, “actually let me”, “Let me write this”, “actually let me” Me neither.

I decided to commit another part to the Applied Reverse Engineering series with an article diving into rolling your own primitive tracer for discrete purposes; coupled with an analysis on outrunning integrity checks. revers.engineering/applied-r…

Dropping some tooling to assist with Windows RE (or any really); bulk download modules across all versions, search for call chains from references, immediates, instructions, etc. Has been useful for mass-analysis, cross-version diffing, variant analysis, and just generally locating candidates for more thorough investigation (ioctl dispatch, rpc handlers/chains, what functions eventually call a desired target). github.com/daaximus/ida-reac…