Act! v2 for Windows 

Act! was written by Symantec, a company that really should have known better. Act! does not actually encrypt data at all. Instead,
it merely stores the password in encrypted format, and asks you to enter the password before it lets you see the database. Not
terribly effective. 

The obvious solution is to create a database of your own and save it. Save it again under a different name, but this time with a
password. Doing a file compare, you should see only a few changes. All but one will be obvious changes, ie, the name of the file. In
one file, filename.MUD, you will see two double-quotes in the 'unencrypted' file, and two double-quotes with junk between them in
the 'encrypted' file. You're almost there already. 

You have two ways to proceed at this point - change the password, or decrypt the original password. We'll start with changing the
password. In the same location (Offset, anyone?) in the *.MUD file you wish to crack, you'll find a set of double-quotes. Actually,
you'll find three. Of the three, only one will have eight or less characters between the quotes. All you have to do is change the first
junk character to a double-quote (to make a set of empty quotes) and fill the rest of the field with the empty 2Eh character. A good
hex-editor will come in handy here. 

The other possibility is to decrypt the password. Its a simple substitution code, thus it'd be simple to write a program to automate the
process. I'm too lazy, any takers? 

a 9E    A BE   1 CE
b 9D    B BD   2 CD
c 9C    C BC   3 CC
d 9B    D BB   4 CB
e 9A    E BA   5 CA
f 99    F B9   6 C9
g 98    G B8   7 C8
h 97    H B7   8 C7
i 96    I B6   9 C6
j 95    J B5   0 ?? 
k 94    K B4  
l 93    L B3
m 92    M B2
n 91    N B1
o 90    O B0
p 8F    P AF
q 8E    Q AE
r 8D    R AD
s 8C    S AC
t 8B    T AB
u 8A    U AA
v 89    V A9
w 88    W A8
x 87    X A7
y 86    Y A6
z 85    Z A5


All those values are hexadecimal, of course. Anyone who cares to look up the punctuation is free to, but nobody uses punctuation
anyway. 

Any information about other versions of Act! is welcome.... To the best of my knowledge, versions 1 and 3 have the same flaws. 




This page was created Wed Aug 11 12:21:15 EDT 1999


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