Hello TechKnow visitors and members,

It all started in 2001, when I saw the application Serials 2000, evolved from Serials '98 which was basically just a CHM with serials. Due the limitation of Serials 2000 I decided to make an addon for it with cdkeys of games. After a year, the addon became pretty popular and other people joined me on this and other projects.

The project grew a lot and the scene accepted a new team, TCA, of which I was the leader. The team expanded their activities to cracking software and games while maintaining the cdkey database. This continued for years up to 2008 when a related member got caught and we realised that we were doing illegal stuff. Some members quit, some joined different groups, and I continued alone, still maintaining the cdkey database and more focus on ripping games, something that always facinated me.

In 2010 Android tablets started to rise, models such as the WonderMedia 8505 were easy to get and cheap. I bought one for myself and was disappointed, the tablet was slow, the installed Android version was incomplete, without the official market (now play store). So I started to analyse why the device was slow, fixed a lot, added improvements for CPU and battery life. This ROM MOD became known as Uberoid and was extremely popular. Due the popularity of the modded firmware, companies started giving me Android devices to make custom firmware for them, these are based on the Uberoid formula, and were released as Uberoid to the public and a special edition of the firmware was build for the company.

In that same year I started TechKnow, the forum for my Android mods/hacks. Thankfully, very helpful people joined TechKnow. Some of these helpful people started to help out on the forum as it was growing too fast for 1 developer to maintain. Thanks to ZapMe1, Satcomranger and Twjordo the forum was under control and everyone who had problems or questions could be helped.

2013 was a rough year, as I discovered while modding WM8850 firmware a trojan inside the firmware, as well a trojan outside the firmware. Eken has been releasing infected firmware, Windows users could be infected when they started the FMAKER.exe tool with a ServStart trojan that agressively replicated itself in every directory and zip file where a .exe was present. This was done because the trojan pretended to be a keyboard service of windows that loads the hook automatically upon starting any .exe file. TechKnow members including myself got hit, so I've made a Trojan CleanUp tool. After analysing the Cloudsservice Trojan inside the firmware on Android level, I've discovered it did a lot of spying, and it was not build for just one model. I've developed a tool to remove the trojan, all was fine... until a new version of the firmware was released, that locked the Android device once the trojan was removed. It didn't take a lot of time to discover that a modified SystemUI.apk was responsible for that, and so a updated version of my Anti Trojan tool was released:

Whoever was behind this trojan, did not like my solution to remove it, attempts to secure their Trojan failed instantly. TechKnow started to get DDoS'd, and not only that, but also received a lot of hack attempts. I'll be honest here, the attempts were pathetic and did not impress. The host of TechKnow however had major problems and decided to quit hosting the forum. The host's other customers also had problems due the DDoS's. TechKnow then received a friendly offer to host elsewhere, with higher security and less costs. After moving the forum, I've developed a Android App with basically the same functionality as the Windows side Anti-Trojan, making it for everyone easy to detect and remove. Ofcourse this spawned a new attack wave against me and TechKnow. Now it has become a fun game as I was fully prepared to get attacked and set out honeypots and tarpits. This eventually made me able to pinpoint the origin of attack. While some were busy to attack me, I managed to get my hands on confidential documents, never meant to see the public, and a toolchain and sourcecode of the WM8850. Obviously I was releasing these into the public, further aggravating my attackers. In 2014 TechKnow had a lot of downtime, however, due the decline of visitors this had a low impact to me. There were less visitors because I didn't have time anymore or resources to develop Android firmware mods or apps, I was busy with these "games".

Nearing the end of 2014 I started on a documentation of what happened technically inside Android with the Trojan, also exposing involved companies and IP's. In march 2015 this document was released and it spiked the downloads of my Anti-Trojan tools. In 2015, TechKnow was taken down about as much as the previous year, about 30-40 times. 3 months after publication of the involved companies, the largest one stopped making Android devices, and attacks stopped completely.

However, I got sidetracked of what I actually wanted to do, and what brought the most traffic: mod firmware. This caused TechKnow to lose a lot of traffic and members. Without the community donating, and no companies sponsoring, years went by without active development. Eventually large Android parts of the forum got closed down or removed.

THAT IS THE QUESTION...

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