DRM and various other copy protection mechanisms are commonly used in today’s software and games. According to most software/game publishers, such measures are absolutely necessary to fight of modern pirates. However DRM and anti piracy measures have become more intrusive in the past couple of years and are nowadays heavily disliked (or may I say hated) by many end users. So how do you know which DRM or anti piracy measures are embedded into the latest PC game or application you just purchased?
The answer is simple – use Protection ID. Protection ID is a freeware application that is capable of identifying over 100 various DRM and copy protection technologies used. This software is capable for detecting DRM such as SecurROM, Starforce, Safedisk along with a number of exe packers, exe protectors, PC game trial protections, malware cryptors, .NET protections, dongles, licenses, installers, PC/ISO protections, CD/DVD sector scans and more (You can see a full list here). Given below is a screenshot taken after running Protection ID on a GTA : San Andreas exe i had on my hard disk:
As in the above case, sometime the software is able to identified any cracks applied to circumvent the protection by various scene and p2p groups. To scan an exe with Protection ID, all you need to do is to click the ‘Scan’ button located on bottom left corner of the screen. Notice the little icons on the left hand panel – those are useful little extra tools which can be used to perform additional tasks.
Download
This software is free and you can download it directly from the following location:
[Click Here] to download Protection ID v6.2.2 from GCW server
