encryption - Decode a PHP encoded with 'zend guard'

Question

We have a website maintained by an old employee and it appears it's encoded by Zend Guard including all backups.

I know a little about Zend Optimizer, but never considered it for source protection as I know in the end the bytecode will need to be decoded for the interpreter, and was sure people easily decode optimized files using some software.

Now I need to decode some files and I can't find anything but some 'paid services'. We have the ownership of the code and are locked out now for any changes and debugging. How can I decode our files back?

Answer 1

Free tools all over the place can do this now:

http://www.showmycode.com/