• Locked out of your Windows system?

    23 Apr 2008

    So, you’re locked out of one of your Windows systems?…maybe you forgot the password or someone changed it on you and then bailed? Well never fret, there is hope.

    Elcomsoft has recently released a new version of their Elcomsoft System Recovery tool. Now, if you ever get locked out of Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista (including SP1), you’ve got a very reasonably-priced tool to help you. Just burn it to CD and boot the machine from it. A couple of steps later and you’re back in business.

    There’s also the free Ophcrack tool if you’d rather try cracking the Windows password hashes. The only caveat is that you’ll really need the pre-calculated rainbow tables for it to be of value.

    Either way, these are great tools for getting yourself out of a bind AND great tools for demonstrating just how vulnerable and stupid it is to not have laptop drives encrypted…or any drive in any system that’s physically vulnerable for that matter.