Why would we hook DirectX?

When creating a cheat for a game, rendering additional content or modifying how the models are rendered into the game is something that sooner or later might be required. There are multiple techniques to achieve this, but one of the most common ones is to hook the 3D graphics component of DirectX API. This API is well documented and all the information can be found publicly on the internet.

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Hi there! This will be just a quick write up about something I did last weekend. A week ago, I got a new router at home. Just by curiosity, or because we always want to know what’s inside of every device, I tried to google for the router’s firmware and the default configurations. I also wanted to harden the device and remove all those settings that come by default and are always a security problem. Guess what, I couldn’t find any interesting information about the device, or at least something that would make me feel that this version is being widely used. So I decided to root it by myself.

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In my previous post, I covered off, how to modify the game using Cheat Engine and IDA in order to be able to cast as many spells as we want without spending Mana, in a nutshell, endless Mana.

If you haven’t read the previous post, please go and read that now. If you have, we are ready to go. Let’s do this.

As I mentioned in the last post, I’m going to explain all the techniques I’ve tried to modify our health and make ourselves invincible. As you may have noticed this only works when you play the game offline, without a server. This is because the server maintains information about the character such as position, mana, and health. But this is not a bad thing. We are learning to reverse games, and everything we try helps us to understand how things work and how we could manipulate them in order to gain an advantage. That said, today I’m going to show you four things I’ve tried to avoid dying in the game, which will help us solve the first Challenge.

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For those who don’t know PwnAdventures, I leave you here a link so you can read a bit about it and try it if you want. Basically, PwnAdventures was created for Ghost in the Shellcode CTF and it is a first-person, open-world MMORPG that takes place on an awesome island where you will have to face different challenges in order to win flags and finish the game. But the curious thing is that this game is intentionally vulnerable to all kinds of hacks: speed hack, unlimited money, and much more.

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tl;dr

I few days ago I decided to try to automatize some activities using Burp. The main goal was to install it in my VPS (without GUI) and try to interact as little as possible. I started to research about Carbonator, Burpa and other alternatives and I discovered that there wasn’t any updated guide (or I didn’t find it) about how to set up everything from zero without GUI. During these days I’ve been talking with another researchers and I came out with the idea of resuming all this steps and information in one post in order to set this down for anyone who needs it.

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