If you are in the software development industry, perhaps a common shareware programmer, or an engineering manager, you need to protect your software. In order to prevent their software from being cracked or illegally used, all software developers will take various measures to protect their software. One of the most commonly used methods is the software registration mechanism.

As software development companies, their biggest concern is that their software will be decompiled/cracked soon after it is launched, so many developers choose to pack/encrypt their software products. In general, the file size of packed software is smaller, and the program itself becomes more secure. These days, packer has been moving towards virtual machine protection technology, whose greatest benefit is that it can greatly improve the protection strength. Packers employing this technology include Themida, WinLicense, EXECryptor, etc.; While the downside is that it affects the startup and running speeds of program, so it's not suitable for every situation.

With the continuous development of processor technology, the 64-bit operating system came out. Later on, the 64-bit applications began to spread widely too. In the field of reverse engineering (i.e.: software cracking), the classic and traditional OllyDbg can only perform reverse analysis on 32-bit applications. At this time, you need to know there is another debugging software that specially designed for analyzing both 32-bit and 64-bit programs - x64dbg.

PEiD (short for PE iDentifier) is a well-known professional packer/cryptor/compiler detecting tool. It's so powerful that it can detect the types/signatures of almost any PE file packing tools (at present, the number has been more than 600 kinds). In addition to the official version, AppNee also provides you its full-plugin version, which can be treated as the most perfect one version (contains 60+ plugins and necessary runtime library files: mfc70.dll, msvcr70.dll, rtl70.bpl, vcl70.bpl) on the Internet at present. I do believe reverse engineers or software cracking/unpacking enthusiasts must like it very much.

Exeinfo PE is a popular and universal free analyzer & detector to executable files' packer/compressor/compiler, written in Delphi by A.S.L from Poland. It is capable of detecting 300+ binary data types (non EXE formats and more signatures on Ext_detector.dll) with info about how to open them via some free tool.