I help support 3rd party plug-ins in our apps. I was debugging an issue a customer found that involved a 3rd party plug-in. So I went to the plug-in vendor’s we

I help support 3rd party plug-ins in our apps. I was debugging an issue a customer found that involved a 3rd party plug-in. So I went to the plug-in vendor’s website and downloaded the demo of their plug-in and installed it. But I noticed that none of my debugger breakpoints were being hit. It turned out the plug-in was disabling the debugger using a system call. So I figured out how to trap the system call they were using and replace it with an immediate return so that patching out the debugger did nothing. I was then able to debug everything, including stepping into their code which would have allowed me to see how their copy protection worked if I had cared to.