This was a great reverse engineering trick. A lot of &quot;hackers&quot; would make their tools <i>super-secure</i> by packing the binary and then protecting it with VMProtect. Because, that&#x27;s way better than just using VMProtect by itself, right?<p>Except that you could run the VMProtected binary until just after the unpacking routine ended giving you the original binary in memory. Didn&#x27;t have to understand VMProtect <i>at all</i>.<p>Thanks hackers!<p>The same thing isn&#x27;t necessarily true with crypto, but the lesson is that thinking you&#x27;re adding security by layering without knowing what you&#x27;re doing might backfire.