Analysis and Reverse Engineering Executable File

Aaron Lin
December 12, 2021
2 min read
Prerequisites
#- WinHex
- 7zip
Tutorial
#Today we'll look into how to reverse engineer an executable file with unknown programming language origin
1 Download WinHex as a prerequisite for the following steps.
You can find one with a license on a torrent site.
2 Open WinHex and drag in your .exe file

3 Start scrolling the hex of the .exe until you find something recognizable. In this case, I found code that could be an indication that it is Java code bundled into an .exe

Note: We can also know this is a launch4j jar bundled inside an exe if we open the .exe with 7zip. It should be the following content structure

Doing some research, we can see that if we can extract the hex starting from PK to the end of the hex, we can turn it back into a .jar file
For reference:
http://reverseengineeringtips.blogspot.com/2014/12/unpacking-launch4j-35-extracting-jar.html
https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3532/get-jar-back-from-wrappedinto-exe-jar
Search for "META-INF" for the starting block. Right click the hex block starting with PK and select Beginning of block

Scroll down to the bottom and right click and set the last hex block as End of block'

Right click the highlighted block and click Edit

Then click Copy Block followed by Into New file and name the file appended with .jar

Right click the .jar file and click 7-Zip followed by Open archive
10If done correctly, the jar should open as java class files
