Hacking Applications With Memory Editors

Well I think that most of you heard of the so called ‘Memory Editors’ like TSearch, GameHack, GameWiz32 and much much more. Well for those who do not know what these are I will explain it briefly. These so called ‘Memory Editors’ are special software that are able to open a process / program while it is running and thses Memory Editors are able search, read and edit it’s variables. So if for example there is a game and you want to edit it’s highscore then all you have to do is open for example TSearch, and run the game, while you are playing you just follow a few steps and you will be able to edit the highscore value and for example from 1000 you will be able to edit it to 100000 or to whatever number you wish.

So in this tutorial I will show you how you can use these special software ( I will use TSearch ) so you can hack games and applications and if you are a software developer how you can avoid your games and applications from being hacked with these methods.

Well first of all you will need TSearch or any other program that is similar ( meaning a Memory Editor ) but I would recommend you TSearch because I have tried many of these Memory Editors but I didn’t find any better than TSearch, because it has a fantastic and very simple to use GUI ( Graphical User Interface ) and it is very user-friendly. Anyways when you choose your favorite Memory Editor Install it and Open it.

Afterwards launch the game or application you want to hack, I made my own program for the tutorial so I will use that as a test, if you are new and want to use my program so you can experiment on it, please find it attached, download it and open it. You can scan it for viruses if you don’t trust it. If you will use it press the button ‘Increase Score’ so it will display that your score is 1.

Now you should have both applications open, go on Tsearch and on the menu bar go to ‘Process -> Open’, or you can press CTRL+O.



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Now select the process you want to edit, in my case I will use ‘TSearch Tutorial.exe’ and click on the small Magnifying button.

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After that this dialog should come up

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If you know the exact value then in the ‘Search:’ select ‘Exact Value’ and in the ‘Value:’ insert the value, if you are using my program and you clicked the button ‘Increase Score’ and it is displaying as 1 then insert 1 in here. And as our number is smaller than 255, select ‘1 Byte’ as ‘Type:’ and press OK. In my case it found 5568 values, now press OK again.

You will see something like this:


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Now you are saying ‘Now how am I supposed to know which one I have to edit?’ Do not worry, continue reading.

Now go into my program and click ‘Increase Score’ so from 1 it will display as 2 so we can identify what we have to modify. Afterwards all you have to do is to click the magnifying button, but not the same one as the first time, this time click the second one:

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and the same dialog will popup again, this time in the ‘Value:’ field write down 2 and click OK, in my case it found one so that is the one I have to edit! If you found more than one repeat this step until you end up with one, in some cases you will end up with two, it depends on how the game or program is built.

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Now just double click on that value and it should be copied into the so called ‘Cheat List’

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Now click on the value field and write down the value you want, for example 10, now open the application, if the score has not changed to the value you write, click the Increase Score and it should increase to the value you wrote + 1. So in my case it will display as 11. It is that simple!

Now as promised I will tell you how you can protect your software and games from this simple hack.

Well I bet that there are many ways, but I will tell you two of them.
Instead of storing the data into a variable, store it into a text box. TSearch should not be able to find it,


You can hold the score into a file and read and write directly to it, and it’s better if you encrypt it so the user will not be able to edit it, but I would not recommend that you use this method, but it’s alwayd an alternative

These methods are still not 100% safe, because if you use option one, a debugger might still find it, and the second one is not secure and not recommended to do.