One of the technicians in Odyssey's Denver office had noticed talk of the ISYS HindSite crack in a newsgroup. He immediately notified the Sydney developers who replaced the restriction code, but Davies is not optimistic about this solving the problem. When we learned HindSite had been cracked by this prominent ring, we immediately beefed up our time-restriction scheme and uploaded new software to our FTP site. The new scheme is far more sophisticated than the last, but I don't doubt it will be attacked again, if not by the same group, then by someone else. Cracking is usually most prevalent amongst high-value software products, such as AutoCad, and game software.
Crackers are more than just mindless vandals.
Most are reasonably skilled programmers, and some are inordinately talented. The amount of effort involved in circumventing a good protection scheme is very substantial, and when you visit the cracking newsgroups, you see less talented people asking for cracks for all sorts of things. The crackers respond to these requests, put in the long hours or weeks, and then freely publish the crack. The motivation is clearly the challenge plus the ego trip of being the first to crack a particular piece of software. Despite many people accessing the HindSite software for free, Odyssey Development had the last laugh on the code crackers.