Cracking VB Controls With SmartCheck

If you've ever tried to crack something that was written in Visual Basic, you may have noticed that things are a little different.  First of all the strings don't show in a dissassembly and there are no references to the windows API functions that C++ programmers use.  Simply put, it is a pain to crack software that was written in Visual Basic.   And now to make things worse, more and more ActiveX controls are being written in VB.

But there are tools out there to make it easier.  One favorite of crackers is NuMega SmartCheck.  This application watches the VB runtime files and captures any internal VB function calls.  But it only really helps for applications that were written in VB.  So how do you debug an ActiveX control (that was written in VB) that is running in VB (that was written in C)?  Will SmartCheck consider it a VB application or a C application?

The truth is that SmartCheck doesn't care as long as it finds a true win32 executable.   And since ActiveX controls usually run in-process, they are actually part of the VB process.  What that means is that you can monitor VB form SmartCheck and nothing will show up.  But any code that was written in Visual Basic will be logged.  That includes ActiveX controls that are placed on forms, IDE Add-Ins, etc. 

This also holds true for ActiveX controls placed in other applications written in C.   For some reason, many crackers don't realize that SmartCheck can be used in this manner.  For more info about SmartCheck, check out NuMega's website.

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