Martin Goltz wrote:I've done my research in the last week, asked many people, I've heard about it, my friend has used WinLicense and his software was cracked anyway (popular game, he switched from WinLicense to custom server side protection since the game works online anyway), you should be careful too.
Because it will be cracked anyway if is needed for more or less amount of ppl, or as IdeasVacuum said some skilled reverse-engineer will crack it for his friend.
No one of widely-used commercial protectors cannot avoid this. There are tools to allowing easily detect what packer/protection you used and then typical steps performed to remove it fast enough.
So the only good protection can be one which was created not so far ago and no one learned and breached it yet. Like some protections used in several AAA-games, but they cost a lot of money.
If you don't want to pay really big moneys for it, then you should search something not much popular, but "looking dangerous".
For example, try to search on russian or chinese hacking resources for tools not well-known in english-speaking world ^^
Then use tools like Packer Detector to see if they are easily detected, read what crackers saying about it and did they write some explained articles already, and do much more such steps to ensure that it will be hard to break chosen protection/s.
The second good protection can be one you write yourself. You know how your program works and you can add many traps and detects to make life of cracker hard and painful enough (but also make your life hard while building all this). Also you can get sources of some packer (even UPX) and modify it to do be very different from widely used version.
And surely those variants can be combined, that should be better what can be done.
Also there are much more tricks not directly related to protection, but helping to avoid crack and illegal distribution.
