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This post is going to be a rather strange post compared to previous ones. But bear with me, in the middle of the post you will see why this post fits the IT security topic.

I'm also terribly sorry for not posting recently, but I was busy with my SPSE and SLAE certification. Both are recommended for Python and Assembly noobs like me. But back to this post.

A little bit of history

Cheating in games started as help for game testers. By using invincibility or infinite ammo testers were able to test the game quicker, which meant less money spent on testing. I personally use cheat codes in games, depending on my mood. Sometimes it feels good to slash all the opponents while I'm invincible, sometimes it is more fun to play the game without cheats. One can argue whether cheating in games is OK or not, but I believe it depends, there is no black or white. But one thing is for sure, it is part of the gaming industry. There is huge demand for cheats. There were even cheat books printed on paper...

The different types of cheats (on PC)

There are different types of cheats in PC gaming. Following is a noncomplete list of these cheats:

Cheat codes

The good old IDDQD type of cheats. These are left in the game by the developers intentionally. Nothing interesting here.

Edit memory

This is my favorite. I will talk about this at the end of the post. Whenever a user launches a new program, the program's whole memory is accessible (read/write) to every other program launched by the user. And since the memory stores the current game state (health, ammo, armor, etc.), these values can be changed easily. In the good old times, there were POKE commands to do this cheats, and the memory address to write into was published by people who found where the game stores the most critical states about the game.

Code injection

This is like patching the game code. For example, one can change the "DEC (pointer to your current health)" instruction with NOP (do nothing), thus becoming invincible. In multi-player cheats, there is the aimbot to help you aim at enemies, wallhack to see through the wall, increase hitbox of the enemy for smoother hit, or in MMORPGs, one can write macros to collect items while the player is not online. I would say the so-called "trainers" more or less fit into this category and the previous one.

Saved game editor

The first time a kid meets a hex-editor (just like the co-author of this blog did with SIM City when he was 10 years old - David). It can teach a lot about file structures, the hexadecimal numeral system, etc. Fun times.

Hacking game server

Not very common, but even more fun. Warning: endless trolling possibilities in multi-player games ahead :) How to hack a game server? Well, I think this might deserve another full blog post ...

Network traffic hacking

One last necessary type of cheating is to modify network traffic between the client and the game server. AFAIK SSL is not universal in gaming, so stunnel is not needed for this hack, but ettercap can help in changing the communication.

Why cheating becomes more critical (and challenging)?

Now in the age of in-app-payments, the game creators are no longer thinking about cheats as funny things but something to be destroyed to the ground. Because cheating decreases its revenue. Or not. At least they think it does. To quote Wikipedia here, "cheating in such games is nonetheless a legal grey area because there are no laws against modifying software which is already owned, as detailed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

A lot of online games include anti-cheating components like PunkBuster, nProtect GameGuard, or Valve Anti-Cheat. This whole cheating/anti-cheating industry is the same as the virus/anti-virus industry. A cat and mouse game.

Freemium games

If you have not played with "freemium" games, you should watch South Park season 18, episode 6. - "Freemium Isn't Free." If you did play with freemium games, you definitely have to watch it :) There are many problems with freemium games. It is free to install, free to play. The first 3-4 hours might be fun to play. But after that, it turns out it is impossible to advance in the game without paying money for it. And by spending cash, I mean spending a LOT! Let's have a look at today's example, an arcade racing video game.

For 99.99 USD, you can get 3 000 000 credit. For almost double the price of a new PC game, you can get these credits. In this particular game, I estimate one have to play ~6-24 hours constantly to get this amount of credit. But by playing ~6 hours, I mean 6 hours without progress in the game! Kind of boring. And what do you get from 3 000 000 credit? You can buy one of the most expensive cars, but can't tune them fully. You have to play more (without progress) or buy more. But guess what, there are more cars you can't buy by only playing the game. Those are only available via in-app-purchase.

Even though the player has 58 765 533 credits, it is not possible to buy this car. Only available through real money.

So, what are your possibilities? You are either Richie Rich, and can afford the money to buy these. Or you can be insane, and try to play the game without in-app-purchase. Or give up the game and try another freemium ... Or, you can try to hack the game!

Hack all the freemium games!

Although I was not playing this racing game from day one, I was able to witness the evolution of the cheats against this game. The cheats which worked in one day was not working one month later. The game is continuously updated to defeat the newly published cheats.

Noob start

So, I want to hack this game, what is the first thing a noob like me does? ~~Bing it!~~ Google it!

From the first page result, let's check this tool:

While trying to download that, I just have to give my email address to spammers, or my mobile number will be subscribed to premium rate text messages. What fun.

Another "cheat" program will install malware/adware on your computer. Never ever try these programs. They are fake 99% of the time and after installing those you will have another problem, not just how to hack freemium games.

Beginners start - Cheat engine

When I first heard about hacking games in memory, I visualized hours of OllyDBG/ImmunityDBG/(insert your favorite Windows debugger here). It turned out, there are some specialized tools to help you with cheating the game. No assembly knowledge required. My favourite tool is CheatEngine. I highly recommend to download it and spend 10 minutes to get past the built-in tutorial levels to get a feeling about this tool. It's super duper awesome.

When I first tried to hack this game myself, I scanned the memory for my actual credit and tried to change that, no luck. Keep reading, you will see what happened.

The second cheat I tried with cheat engine was something like this:

Start the game, play the first level, and check how many credits is paid for winning the race. Pro tip: use dual display for full-screen game cheating.
Restart the same level, attach Cheat Engine to the game's process
Scan the memory for the same value at the beginning of the race
Scan the memory for the same value at the end of the game. The intersect of the first and second scan includes the real value where the credit is stored for winning the race.
Change the values (both the real one and some false positives) to something big
Watch the game to crash
Be amazed at the money you received

Nowadays, most of the cheats on YouTube does not work. Except for these kind of cheats. I don't want to recreate that tutorial, so you should watch it first then come back.

Are you back? Great. Do you have any idea what have you just seen? No? Well, in this case, don't try this at home. Copy-pasting assembly code from random internet posts and running on your computer is always a bad idea. It is precisely as risky as downloading free programs from random internet sites.

Although I have not seen people trolling others with this cheat engine type of shellcode, I think the time will come when these will be turned into something terrible. These shellcodes might work, or might harm your computer. The good news is, we can have a look at the code and analyze it.

When you open CheatEngine and try to define a new custom type, you are greeted with a skeleton assembly code. I don't want to detail what all the skeleton code does, let's just focus on the difference between the skeleton code and the code used in the video. This is the "decrypt function":

xor eax, 0baadf00d
rol eax, 0e

What does it mean? The actual credit is encrypted in memory. If you want to scan it in memory, you won't be able to find it. But! The encryption is rotating the value to the right (ROR) with 0xE (14 in decimal), and after that, it is XOR-ed with 0xbaadf00d. Decrypting it is the inverse of the functions in reverse order (in this particular case, the order does not matter, but that's not the point). The inverse function of XOR is XOR, and the inverse function of ROR (rotate right) is ROL (rotate left). Now that we analyzed the assembly code, we can be sure that it is safe to execute. Just follow the video and see your coins falling from the sky. For free. In a freemium game. Have fun!

Encrypt memory - applications at financial institutions

Another exciting thing is that I don't recall any thick client applications in the financial industry encrypting the values in memory. And I agree, there are more significant problems with thick client applications than not encrypting the essential values in memory. But still, some thick client applications are regularly updated, maintained. Maybe it is a good idea to encrypt the values in memory. It will make attackers' life harder. Not impossible, but harder. Perhaps the developers of these applications should learn from the gaming industry (or from malware developers for that matter) because it is a shame that an arcade racing game or an FPS is protected better than an application responsible for transacting millions of dollars. Just think about the RAM scraping malware stealing millions of credit card data ...

Moral of the story

Cheating is part of the gaming history, and the freemium games are trying to take away the cheats from the gamers because they want money. Thanks to CheatEngine and some clever hacks, these programs can be still beaten. And guess what, there is CheatEngine for Android - although it did not work for me on the latest Android. And sometimes, hacking all kinds of applications can be more comfortable with CheatEngine, compared to traditional debuggers.

Also, always check the code before executing it! And when you find something cool, publish it, so everyone could enjoy the games!

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10 Top JavaScript Blogs to Improve Coding Skills

The Best JavaScript Blogs

With two decades of improvement, JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages of all time. The journey started in 1995 when Brendan Eich created JavaScript in just 10 days. From there, it has seen multiple revisions, drafts, and growth in the form of frameworks, API's, modules, etc. Today, we will go forward and list the top JavaScript blogs from the internet so that you can enjoy the lastest development in the field of JavaScript.

According to RedMonk programming language rankings and GitHut.info, JavaScript is leading the pack in the terms of repositories and the most discussed programming language on StackOverFlow. The numbers itself speaks about the future of JavaScript as it has grown beyond the initial capabilities of simple DOM manipulations.

Learning JavaScript, on the other hand, can be a tricky proposition. New libraries, features, API's or Style Guide, pop up almost every day. The speed of iteration is beyond imagination, and that is why reading leading JavaScript blogs are the best approach to keep up with new changes.

JavaScript is blessed with experts that regularly contribute to the community using live streams, videos, blogs, podcasts, conferences and open source projects. An example of a cool experienced Javascript programmer is evilsoft who broadcasts awesome Javascript projects weekly on LiveEdu..

Some blogs are just gold even when they are not updated frequently. To help you reach the best content on JavaScript, let's list the best JavaScript blogs on the internet. The following blogs have a huge fan following and contain epic JavaScript content.

10 Top JavaScript Blogs to Improve Coding Skills

1. David Walsh Blog

David Walsh is a renowned name in the JavaScript world. He started his career with DZone, but his first real break came while working for SitePen as a Software Engineer. His blog composes of topics related to JavaScript, personal thoughts, guides and much more. The blog design is captivating and is going to hook you up on the first visit. Currently, he is working as a Senior Web Developer at Mozilla.

top javascript blogs

2. DailyJS

DailyJS is one of the best JavaScript blogs on the internet. The blog was started by Alex R. Young, an entrepreneur and Node.js expert in 2009. However, there are recent changes that don't sound great. Currently, the blog is no longer updated, but that does not make the content useless at all. The blog covers diverse content on JavaScript including frameworks, API's, libraries, etc.

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3. SitePoint

SitePoint is one of the leading web development portals since 2000. The main attraction of SitePoint is the collection of highly detailed articles. They are aimed at teaching something new to the readers. JavaScript, on the other hand, is one of the leading topics on the website where experts around the world contribute regularly. The rate of the new blog post is high, and you won't find a blog post that doesn't teach you something new. Truly, a great learning place for any JavaScript developer.

3-Sitepoint

4. JavaScript.com

Not technically a blog, but if you love JavaScript, then you need to follow the website's offerings. JavaScript.com news section is an aggregator for excellent JavaScript news, tutorials, guides, and much more. All you need to do is move to their news section and discover tons of new content surrounding JavaScript. The domain is owned by CodeSchool and is mainly utilized to contribute to the community and a landing page to their courses.

4-JavaScript

5. Brendan Eich

What's the best place to find JavaScript knowledge? The inventor? Well, you are right. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, keeps his blog with filled with his musings and other excellent thought processes about JavaScript. You can also find videos on the blog. Virtually, the blog is the mind of JavaScript where you understand it in an entirely different manner.

5-brendan-eich

6. JavaScript Playground

JavaScript Playground is yet another great place to get started with all the different JavaScript frameworks, API, and libraries. The focus is to work with the JavaScript ecosystem and provide high quality blog articles, screencast, and podcast for the audience. They also blog about different JavaScript guidelines, tips, and tricks.

6-JavaScript-Playground

7. Superhero.js

If you are looking for a superhero to fetch you the best resources on JavaScript, then you have finally found one. Superhero.js is a simple website that aims to collect everything related to JavaScript including videos, articles, presentations, etc. The content is divided into meaningful sections such as "Understanding JavaScript", "Organize Your Code", etc. Also, the page is regularly updated with new information.

7-superhero

8. JavaScript Jabber

Another "not a blog entry" into the list — JavaScript Jabber is a weekly podcast on JavaScript. Each podcast is around 1 hour of jabber and will sure have something for you to learn. They keep their tab on everything related to JavaScript, including core concepts to popular Framework discussions.

8-JavaScript-Jabber

9. Medium JavaScript Collection

Is medium a blog? Technically, not, but it contains high quality JavaScript articles. Medium is a way to connect to the audience so be ready to read many opinions on how JavaScript should have been, and what's wrong with JavaScript. Other than the ramblings, it hosts amazing JavaScript content such as Speed Up Web Apps.

9-JavaScript-collection-medium

10. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is one of the oldest websites covering web designing and development. They have a dedicated section for JavaScript, which is constantly updated with tutorials of high caliber. The tutorials surround other web development ideas such as UX, Productivity, etc.

10-smashing-magazine

Conclusion

Here are the ten best JavaScript blogs to improve your coding skills. The blogs and mix of other content types will help you to keep up with new changes in JavaScript field, and improve yourself accordingly.

If you are new to JavaScript and want to get started as soon as possible, check out the JavaScript learn section on LiveEdu.tv. And, yes, it is the most popular programming language on LiveEdu.tv which can benefit from your attention! Also, don't forget to leave a comment on how the JavaScript category page can be improved. We are listening!

Dr. Michael J. Garbade

About Author Dr. Michael Jurgen Garbade is the founder of LiveEdu.TV, Kyuda, Education Ecosystem. He is future Venture Capitalist, Future Politician and always on the lookout for the Next Big Challenge. Obtained Masters in business administration and physics, and a Ph.D. in finance with professional work experience in high-paced environments at Fortune 500 companies like Amazon and General Electric. Expertize: Python, PHP, Sencha Touch & C++, SEO, Finance, Strategy & E-commerce. He speaks English and German and has worked in the US, Europe, and Asia. At Education Ecosystem he is the CEO and runs business operations.

@£√£RYTHING NT

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