On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 10:53:18PM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 10:21:08PM -0500, Florin Iucha wrote:
> > On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 07:01:13PM -0700, Munir Nassar wrote:
> > > there is a linux bootdisk that has NTFS support and
> > > you can use this floppy to "recover" windows
> > > 2000/NT4/NT3.51 Administrator passwords... talk about
> > > sloppy security!
> > 
> > Not to nitpick too much here but with a boot/root linux disk I can do that too
> > with your Linux box.
> 
> Not to nitpick too much, but it may not be the same thing, depending on what
> Munir meant by "recover".  With a linux boot floppy, you can _reset_ the root
> password, but you still can't find out what the existing password is (which
> is what I take "recover the password" to mean).

Well, You already started: if you _are_ root on the box you can fetch 
/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and feed them through seti at home and get the
plain password.

The idea of using Seti at Home just spring to my mind - are you sure all your
computing time is going to find little green guys? What if somebody at
UCB "modified" some clients to do some usefull work?

> Discovering the existing password is far, far worse.  Not only is it not
> obvious to the box's legitimate owner, they may have used the same password
> on other systems, which you now have access to also.  Fortunately, it's not
> too difficult to make this effectively impossible these days.

Worse, but doable.

florin

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