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I never realized the it was even easier to replace a lost (or to hack a machine given you have physical access) a Linux machine. Jason Striegel posted this example over at Hackszine.com on how to reset a lost Ubuntu password. It’s surprisingly simple to reset, simply follow the steps outlined below. Here’s how to do it on a typical Ubuntu machine with the GRUB bootloader:

Boot Linux into single-user mode

1. Reboot the machine.
2. Press the ESC key while GRUB is loading to enter the menu.
3. If there is a ‘recovery mode’ option, select it and press ‘b’ to boot into single user mode.
4. Otherwise, the default boot configuration should be selected. Press ‘e’ to edit it.
5. Highlight the line that begins with ‘kernel’. Press ‘e’ again to edit this line.
6. At the end of the line, add an additional parameter: ’single’. Hit return to make the change and press ‘b’ to boot.

Change the admin password
The system should load into single user mode and you’ll be left at the command line automatically logged in as root. Type ‘passwd’ to change the root password or ‘passwd someuser’ to change the password for your “someuser” admin account.

Reboot

That’s it, just reboot into your normal configuration with the new root password.

Ubuntu would be neat to try, but for many of us, having to leave Windows and boot into a whole different operating system is a full day project.

Nerdbusiness created this tutorial. So you don’t have to leave Windows to try ubuntu. I’ll be showing you how to setup a “virtual machine” inside Windows that will run Ubuntu inside a tidy little window. So you can launch it from the Start Bar. And have Ubuntu running in the background just like any other Windows program like the internet browser or your game of solitaire.

Having Ubuntu running inside Windows is just cool. Plus, it's a great way to try out all of Ubuntu's features

Read the rest of this entry �

Techcrunch posted an article stating “Gartner Says Vista Will Collapse. And That’s Why The Yahoo Deal Must Happen”.The last paragraph sums up the Gartner view:

The real question isn’t “What can Microsoft do to fix their Windows product?” but rather “Even If Windows and Office were perfect, would it be enough to keep Microsoft relevant in the medium term?” I think the answer to that latter question might be “nope.” And that, of course, is why they want Yahoo so badly. Online advertising revenue is their only real hope of long term survival.

This of course is a complete load of crap. Vista WAS handled poorly by Microsoft, but its not the collapse of Windows by any stretch of the imagination. The most laughable thing is that while so called “analysts” are predicting the demise of Windows,Vista alone (ie, not counting Windows server or XP) still has more market share than *nix and OS X COMBINED. The real reason Vista isn’t selling as well as MS hoped is because of Windows XP. XP has turned out to be a mature, stable, and secure OS. Vista has new plumbing and the kinks are still being worked out (to be expected). The underlying plumbing put into Vista however will position it for the long term, and XP will ultimately be phased out. Don’t count Vista, or Windows as a whole “out”.

The image below shows Windows market share versus the only other statistically relevant OS’s (ie, over 1% market share) as of March 2008.

It’s true that *nix based systems have made some inroads in business computing, however, Windows still controls 90% of the market. Linux doesn’t even show up on the list… it ranks at  0.61% (though OS X REALLY is a flavor of unix so you could count that in the *nix category) Ask any non-geek what OS they run and you’ll get two answers, Windows or OS X, but mostly just windows. The people predicting these things needs to step out of the basement and away from their Tux stuff animals for a bit and look at the real world. Could the apple cart be upset, absolutely, but it won’t happen over night and Microsoft will have time to react.

This article has gotten a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon. If you’re coming here from Stumbleupon, the URL to this article has changed (used to be paulspoerry.com/index.php/…. and now the index.php has been removed. If you could, please hit your “I like it!” button and give me a thumbs up.Thanx.

The free, open source Ophcrack Live CD is a Windows account password cracking tool designed to help you recover lost Windows passwords.

After you download the 462mb .iso and burn it to a CD, just restart your computer and boot up the Live CD. Once the CD boots, blamo… Ophcrack automatically loads and is on its way to cracking your password.

(screenshot of ophcrack on Linux cracking Windows passwords)

Features:

• Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (intel).
• Cracks LM and NTLM hashes.
• Free tables available for alphanumeric LM hashes.
• Loads hashes from local SAM, remote SAM.
• Loads hashes from encrypted SAM recovered from a Windows partition, Vista included.

I’ve yet to try this live bootable version, but I used l0phtcrack (now LC5 and no longer produced since the company that made it was bought by Symantec) a few years ago and retrieved 99% of the passwords off a backup domain controller in something like 12 hours (using a not-so-powerful desktop to do the cracking).

Get ophcrack Live CD. FYI - you can still get l0phtcrack (aka LC5) from mirrors like sectools.org.

STUMBLEUPON UPDATE:

A couple people have asked if this really works. I just want to re-iterate that this DOES work. It requires physical access to the machine, but if you have physical access you can literally crack every password on a machine in a very short time. As I said above, I used it on a backup domain controller and in about 12 hours cracked every single password on the BDC.

Why crack passwords when you can just create a new Admin account?

Most people tell me they simply “lost” their password. If that’s the case you can use some free tools to create a new Administrator account. With this account you can simply change the existing accounts password, use the new Admin account, or… well… do anything you want. Read more in my article: Hack Vista - Create a new admin account