How do people reverse-engineer compiled applications to get the source code?

Question

I know the long answer to this question would probably be the equivalent of a college course, but can you summarise how tech people do this?

If you open game.exe with a text editor you’re just going to get what looks like a scrambled mess of characters, so how would one convert this into readable source code?

In: 5

Answer 1

Aside from disassembling the code, there is another neat trick. You can wrap a program in a way that lets you intercept and monitor calls out of the program and into system and custom libraries. Oftentimes that gives you the essential parts of the code without needing to disassemble and understand the code.