How 4 bytes got me into programming

DETOURS.DLL / 0x4C3F / ws2_32::connect() ws2_32::send() ws2_32::recv() 55 PUSH EBP 8B EC MOV EBP, ESP 83 EC 14 SUB ESP, 14h E8 25 00 00 00 CALL DetourTransactionBegin 0F B6 45 08 MOVZX EAX, BYTE [EBP+8] KERNELRIOT / reader::post / markdown::render / prism::pending 55 PUSH EBP 8B EC MOV EBP, ESP

Both my father and my older brother are computer programmers. But I wasn't a child prodigy at all. I didn't like the BASIC exercises my dad gave me. I preferred fixing hardware over dealing with software, and by "fixing" I mean plugging old SCSI disks, bigfoot HDDs, and whatever else I could get my hands on. I was only a child, and what I loved the most was GAMES. A whole bunch of them.

When the MMORPG hype started growing around the 2000s, I was playing every single MMO I could get my hands on. Always on the official servers, doing my best, grinding my way through, and of course, scripting, hacking, exploiting. My favorite game back then was MU Online, an MMO that I hold dear to my heart and that I'm very close to its core community. My Ragezone account dates back to 2004. I was 13 at the time.

Around that period, I was the first to discover and publish the first MU Online dupe method that used Direct Packet Injection, since the previous method (Synclogon) was already patched by WebZen. This finding was published under my name on the now extinct MU Online forum on MPCHEATS.de.

Exploiting games is exciting, and you learn a LOT in the process. I didn't understand how the gameserver worked at the time, but I knew the game mechanics inside out, which helped me come up with solutions for previously patched dupe methods. And that's the thing: I came into all of this backwards. I wasn't writing code and then deciding to break something. I was breaking things first, and that's what eventually pulled me into IDA Pro, into reading assembly, into actually learning how to code. The need to understand what I was exploiting is what made me a programmer.

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