A worldwide team of crackers managed to generally attack the Pace iLok dongle security system. An automized unwrapper for protected applications has surfaced on the net. The unwrapper is compatible to MacOS X 10.6 (Slow Neopard) and works for the Intel based part of universal binaries only.

The Pace iLok dongle is mainly used by music applications and music plugins. As this market is a little one, the impact of the generic unwrapper is not predictable at the moment. Anyway we suppose, that producers and studios – hopefully – do use legally licensed software and that this unwrapper is used for try before buy possibilities. Marketpenetration comes with confirmed habit of users.

Although some iLok protected applications are offered as trial, forum users say trial times are much too short and having to register a Pace iLok account is considered to not be comfortable for the average user.

Anyway, forum reports indicate that many developers using the Pace iLok dongle have applied additional custom protection layers, which render the Pace iLok unwrapper not useful at least for the average John Doe. It is expected that iLok will very soon add new encryption layers for improved security.