+Greythorne the Technomancer (+gthorne)

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Template:Infobox scientist **+Greythorne the Technomancer**, also known by the shortened form of his name +gthorne, is a reverse engineer, one of the original members/professors of The Old Red Cracker's (+ORC) Higher Cracking University (+HCU).

Greythorne's Personal Logo is shown here, apparently reproduced in triplicate (found reposted at http://www.krasizlatev.com/lonestar/)

 File:Greythorne's Logo.jpg
+Greythorne worked as partner with the now legendary reverser Fravia, another +HCU founder, on reverse engineering topics and internet privacy & security. See +Greythorne's Privacy Nexus. Tools used included debuggers, deadlisting tools, assemblers and disassemblers.

The +HCU was the only resource of its kind, founded by +ORC in 1995 and has been the inspiration and starting point for untold numbers of students in reverse engineering and computer information security fields in all corners of the globe, as described in the book "Security Warrior" (O'reilly Press):

"One of the legendary figures of those heady days was the Old Red Cracker, (+ORC). Not only was +ORC a genius sofware reverser, he was a prolific author and teacher of the subject. His classic texts are still considered mandatory reading for RCE students.
In order to further RCE research, +ORC founded the High Cracking University, or +HCU. The "+" sign next to a nichname, or "handle," designated members of the +HCU. The +HCU students included the most elite Windows reversers in the world. Each year the +HCU published a new reverse engineering challenge, and the authors of a handful of the best written responses were invited as students for the new school year."

For this purpose, Greythorne published the +orcpacks with tools and lessons for people to have what they needed to get into the reverse engineering field. The lessons of the Higher Cracking University were posted with a deadline to the +HCU professors for review and grading. One such example was the "Millennium Strainer" with a December 1999 Deadline. Excerpt, found still alive on the internet at another good mirror of their lessons and materials in a quote from Fravia:

"Dear readers, I'm proud to introduce the Millennium strainer, for the +HCU 2000 courses. I know that we are late: due to the problems that are listed elsewhere we have had a three-months delay in the presentation of the strainer this year. I would therefore propose that all your answers for admission should be presented either to +Aesculapius, to +ORC, to +Greythorne, or to me BEFORE THE 15 December 1999, so that you will have four months and two weeks to solve the strainer and we will have some time for the evaluation of all results. We hope that +ORC will send his contribute very soon, but we will anyway publish the fourth challenge of this strainer before the end of August."

In addition to working with the +HCU, he wrote and published many tutorials, which have been copied, reposted and translated around the internet since the 1990s, to train newer users how to get into the field of Reverse Engineering under the title "Assembly and Cracking from the Ground Up." One such article in the series is on the topic of How to set up SoftIce from the Windows'95 days, a software debugging program. Another was his article with source code on win32 (Windows 32-bit) api debugging once SoftIce is up and running.

One of Greythorne's original programming contributions to the world of reverse engineering in the 1990s was his symbiote -- a handy tool that allowed programmers to add functionality to other programs. The symbiote was written in TASM (Borland's Turbo Assembler) and the full source was provided by +Greythorne. Other programmers followed with versions written for Windows applications. Quoted by another +HCU member, +Mammon\_: "Greythorne the Technomancer, whose Symbiote program is not only an excellent cracking tool, but a perfectly-commented example for learning assembly language."

According to the late reverser Fravia in this page in 1999: "Greythorne the Technomancer has a series of assembler essays and a lot of "orcpacks", i.e. +ORC's lesson with ALL (yes, all) the targets (i.e. the programs) that +ORC uses in his tutorial. On his site you'll find very important introductions to assembly language and many other goodies. Since he spreads real knowledge, Greythorne has been censored a lot on the web. +Greythorne is an Unix guru, a System administrator, a wizard of knowledge and my web\_brother since 1996.
Don't let the "poor" graphic design of his sites fool you! +gthorne is in reality a famous web-designer!
This is one of the BEST KNOWLEDGE SITES of the whole web. Visiting +gthorne's pages you'll find EVEN MORE than on my own ones... he is one of the few good crackers which give away his (very deep) knowledge without even thinking about compensation"

According to Fravia's wiki, Greythorne's partner Fravia died in 2009.

A student by the handle of 'Watchdog' at examnotes.net stated it best in 2001: "What led me to start win32 programming in assembly were the reverse engineering tutorials located at Fravia and Greythorne sites....I learned a lot from those reverse engineering tutorials and they were a great stress reliever when I was working in the auditing field."

The best resource for information about Greythorne, Fravia, +ORC and the +HCU is the last known mirror of Fravia's massive data archive at woodman.com. There are literally hundreds of pages of reverse engineering data and code lessons & examples.

For reference, the woodmann site was the source used live at ReCon 2006 (Fravia speaking live in video): https://archive.org/movies/thumbnails.php?identifier=Fravia\_Reversing\_our\_searching\_habits\_Power\_searching\_without\_google

## References

* http://www.amazon.com/Security-Warrior-Cyrus-Peikari/dp/0596005458/ref=sr\_1\_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427809053&sr=1-1&keywords=security+warrior Security Warrior, Copright 2004, by Cyrus Peikari (Author), Anton Chuvaki, O'Reilly Press
* http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/ The last known mirror of Fravia's reverse engineering archives
* http://set-ezine.org/index.php?num=16&art=11 Set 39 Technical Guide "Call for Papers" - References +gthorne's tools "orcpacks" (Spanish, 2014)
* http://davide.eynard.it/malawiki/HcuStory Article about +HCU and +gthorne "another mighty reverser" and "home of the great +orcpacks" (2014)
* http://www.gladerebooted.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2363 Fravia's Last Challenge (2008, reposted in 2011)
* http://egloos.zum.com/ieee/v/8985264 Greythorne's win32api guide (2006 Korean Translation)
* http://gthorne.reteam.org/ +Greythorne's Privacy Nexus - Greythorne's anonymity tools reposted by the Reverse Engineering Team (2003)
* http://computer-programming-forum.com/46-asm/0c3f575642bb9167.htm Adding code to programs with TASM (2003)
* http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/links.htm "Cast" (Founding) members and contributors to the +HCU (2001)
* http://www.examnotes.net/index.php?topic=17662.0 Examnotes.net student describes Fravia and Greythorne's contributions (2001)
* http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/orc1.htm History of First Contact with Fravia and the Old Red Cracker (1997, Republished in 1999)
* http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/2600 "Clampdown" Article Archives $2600 Magazine Volume 15, Number 1 (Spring 1998)
* http://eidanyoson.8k.com/xelemental.htm Greythorne's Tutoriales de Assembly y cracking básico (1998 Spanish Translation)
* http://acrigs.com/FRAVIA/greysice.htm Softice's breakpoints, an interesting list - Article by +Greythorne (October 30,1997)
* http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/king.html Record of postings regarding possible death of +ORC (June 1997)
* http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/lost.html +ORC hints that he knows the identities of +gthorne and Fravia (May 1997)
* http://www.woodmann.com/krobar/beginner/03.htm Greythorne's Article on How to set up SoftIce (1997)
* http://eidan.ar.tripod.com/assemg1.htm Greythorne's Binary and Hexadecimal Number System Guide (1997 Spanish Translation)
* http://www.pablin.com.ar/computer/info/cracking/moebius/win32api.txt Greythorne's guide on win32api (1997)

## +ORC Cracking Tutorial Archives (Including work by +gthorne and fravia+)

* http://www.geocities.ws/macjesusc/ocr/howto41.html WLCheck Lesson including source code (Greythorne and Fravia, 1997)
* http://www.geocities.ws/macjesusc/ocr/howto42.html Microsoft Lesson including source code (Fravia, 1997)
* http://www.it-docs.net/ddata/786.pdf HowTo3.1 (Fravia/Greythorne/Orc Tutorial stored at IT-Docs.Net)
* http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/17930/howto93.htm.html Greythorne's work documented at PacketStormSecurity.com

## See also

* Reverse engineering
* Hacker (computer security)
* Software cracking