I have a laptop that is four years old. It is currently on the domain and login is no problem. When I set up the machine years ago I must have set the local machine Admin's account password to who-knows-what. I have had no reason to log onto the local machine as Admin in four years and yesterday I had to but for the life of me cannot remember the password that I set when I prepped the laptop to start with nor can I find my device used, if I set one up, to recover the forgotten password. I am under the belief that resetting the Admin password for a local machine access is not possible outside of a complete reload of the OS but I am going to reach out to see if anyone else has any other suggestions. Oh, and I think I have been around these parts, (Spiceworks) long enough to not be accused of trying to do something unethical, illegal.
Or fattening. I assume you mean the OS's local admin, not the bios password! If you do need to update the bios password, you may be lucky if you have a late model Dell (I wrote about a Dell Bios PowerShell module at: tfl09.blogspot.com/2014/11/dell-bios-module.html). You don't say what OS you are using - but if it's Windows 7 then read this link:. In researching this answer, I found serveral similar sets of instructions. There used to be several Flopoy disks, which became bootable ISO image of what was, in effect, a thin version of Linux that in effect enabled you to edit the local SAM. Pogostick noted above is certainly a good option. Is the laptop joined to a working AD domain?
If so, then you can login to the laptop as domain admin and just change the local password using Local Users and Groups in the MMC). In the meantime: see for more information on tools to reset your password. Finally, if it's a 4 year old OS.
While our netwrokd administrator was admitted to a hospital for an emergency surgery (he is now in coma), being as a temporary delegate, I was ordered by our Institution to turn OFF Mail funciton and to change the admin account password for Mac OS X Server 10.9.2 for security reasons. While changing the password, I took a memo for the new password, but later it turned out to be wrong! My stupidity. After restart, I cannot open Server.app that controls Mail service because it requires the unknown new password. Currently Mail service is OFF (it had been turned OFF for security reason before password change), but I' going to need to turn it ON soon after the order is lifted. To do that, however, I need the new password. Luckily, the server still provides access to the Internet.
Thus I can still ask you. Thanks to the following instruction, I find a way to reset the admin password.
I carried out a test of the same procedure on another Mac (10.9.2). In the test, although resetpassword command in Recovery Mode successfully updated the account password, it didn't update default Keychain password at the same time. After restart, the OS asks if I want to update 'default Kecyhain password'.
To update it, I need to enter the older Keychain password that I don't know. If I skip the update, Keychain asks passwords repeatedly, and without the old Keychain password, I can't launch and open Keychain Access. Then I found this. It says you can reset the Keychain password by Keychain First Aid. However, in my test, Keychain First Aid still asks the older Keychain password, so this doesn't work.
In short, I can update the admin password, but not the Keychain password without knowing the old password. So if I carry out this on the server machine, The Server won't run properly and would ask passwords over and over again.
On the test Mac I tried to activate root user, hoping the root user could change Keychain password without knowing the old Keychain password. But I couldn't access to the 'login' Keychain of the account in question from the root account. Does anyone know a work-around? Is there a way to reset the default Keychain password without the old Keychain password?
Or, is there a way to know the old Keychain password? Probably not. Or, do you think TimeMachine can undo my failure in changing the admin password and recover the old admin password? During this mail shutdown period, I assume many people have asked his health status by email.
It's an emergency and I really need your help! In conclusion, TimeMachine recovery of the entire system to the status before changing admin password worked well. I recovered the old admin password and it worked for Keychain Access as well.
In details; Just in case the recovery doesn't work and I lose the TimeMachine backups somehow, I copied the TimeMachine backup to another external drive. To do that, however, I needed admin password. So, first I had to reset the admin password. Note: In my case, the destination for TimeMachine backup was a local partition (probably), so I didn't need network password to access it. If it were in network, for example, you would need password that has been lost at step 8.
Then this procedure may not work for you. Before actually try the following steps, it may be good to see if you need password for system recovery, following (step 5 in this page is the key), but just cancel when you are asked to choose date and time. Open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences. Choose Time Machine Open Time Machine Preferences.
Time Machine Password Recovery
Slide the Time Machine switch to Off. Restart the Mac with Command + R keys held down to enter Recovery Mode. In Recovery Mode, launch Terminal.app.
In Terminal.app, type resetpassword. Choose the admin account and set new password. Warning about Keychain will appear. Now you get admin password at the cost of loosing Keychain password. The server won't work properly any longer.
The OS will ask if you want to update Keychain password. Because you don't know the old password. You can't do that.
Password Cracking Times Chart
So just choose Continue in the middle. The system will ask Keychain passwords, but you have to ignore them. Connect an external drive that is large enough. If necessary, reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). See. Click the icon of the new backup drive and choose Get Info from the File menu or press Command-I (⌘-I). Make sure Ignore ownership on this volume at the bottom of the Sharing & Permissions: section is not checked.
Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the current backup drive. Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive. Drag the folder Backups.backupdb on the current backup drive to the root level of the new backup drive.
Enter an administrator name and password ( you needed to reset the admin password for this step), then click OK to start the copying process. This may take some time to complete because all the backups will be copied. After the copy has completed, you can eject the eternal drive.
Restart the machine with Command and R keys held down to enter Recovery Mode. In Recovery Mode, Select Restore from a Time Machine Backup, then click Continue. Select the TimeMachine storage. Select the date and time of the backup you want to restore, then follow the onscreen instructions.
In my case, I successfully recovered admin password as well as default Keychain password.
This guide will NOT WORK with Mountain Lion 10.8. Please view our new, updated guide for This guide is an updated version of our extremely popular guide,. The guide has been updated to work with Lion 10.7. Requirements. Physical access to the machine. If you need to crack passwords on Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard, please use our tried-and-true guide. Gain Root OR Admin Access If you don’t have access to an administrator already, you need to acquire root access.
If you don’t have admin access, boot the computer into Single-User Mode by holding CMD+S on startup, mount the drive, and type the command: /sbin/mount -uw / Followed by: launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist And finally: passwd Then, enter your new root password when prompted twice. After the password has been reset, type: restart And hit return/enter. Log In Log into an administrator account that you have access to on the computer, or, if you don’t have access to one, select “Other” in the Login Window (only if you have User Account Pictures enabled), and enter “root” as the username, and then the password that you just set. Download Utility For 10.7, we’ll be using the DaveGrohl utility to both crack the password and extract the hash. The utility works by extracting the hash from the User Profile, which is located in: /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/.plist Withreplaced with the name of the target user. It pulls the hash from the ‘ShadowHashData’ field and begins cracking.
NOTE: It appears that the isn’t working, so we’ve put up a mirror: Download the (MIRROR). Open Up Terminal and Open the Directory Once you’ve downloaded the utility, open up Terminal and type: cd Downloads/DaveGrohl 5. Crack The Password Type the following to begin cracking the password: sudo./dave -u Replacing with the shortname of the target user and entering your password when prompted (it will not prompt you for a password if you’re logged into the root account). DaveGrohl will begin cracking your password via wordlists and then continue with brute-forcing until it gets the password. It can take quite a bit of time, depending on the complexity of the password, so be patient! Passwords we’ve cracked have ranged from a few seconds to several days.
When DaveGrohl has successfully cracked the hash, it’ll spit out a message like this: - Found password: 'banana' - (dictionary attack) Finished in 0.772 seconds / 51,860 total guesses 67,209 guesses per second. Optional: Extract Hashes If you only have a limited window of access to the target computer, DaveGrohl can give you the hash formatted for cracking in John The Ripper, so you can crack the password on a computer of your choice at your convenience. We cover how to use John in our, so check that out if you’re interested. To extract a correctly formatted hash, use this command: sudo./dave -j Replacing with the target user’s shortname, and again, entering your password if prompted. You can then copy and paste the output into a.txt file and load it into John.
Advanced Options Here are a few advanced options that can be used when cracking passwords with DaveGrohl. Type: sudo./dave before entering any of the following parameters.u username: Crack a user’s password.i: Incremental attack only.c chars: Specify possible characters in the password.m #: Specify minimum length of the password.M #: Specify maximum length of the password.v: Verbose mode. (hella slow) -j username: Dump a user’s password hash formatted for John the Ripper.h: Help Let us know in the comments if this worked for you! ‘passwd’ doesn’t actually know how to change a user’s password anymore. Instead, it asks the guy in charge of user accounts ‘opendirectoryd’ to do it for him. In single-user mode, you have start the open directory daemon before you can reset anybody’s password.
The commands are: /sbin/mount -uw / launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist passwd username Depending on the specific version of OS X, passwd is sometimes smart enough to do this for you, but don’t count on it. When using the recovery mode is there anyway to find out what the old password is? I’ve already tried the Command-S option and yet to try the Option-R. If not is there any way to find out the old password? I’ve already tried: root-passwd and the old codes that you had up before. It’s been a while since I looked at the site or anyone has posted so I’m not too sure if I will get a reply. From what it looks like the new codes should work for figuring out the old password so I’ll save the option-R for later until I know for sure.
Like Dave, above, JTR doesn’t recognize my hash, whether it was extracted by DaveGrohl or manually per the “Decrypt OS X User Account Passwords” post. So then I reset the root password and logged in as “Other.” (I had thought I’d had an admin password but didn’t know what else to try.) Now, when I follow instructions, I get the same GUID, and Dave gives me the same (bad) hash; but when I try to manually extract the hash in Terminal, it says “No such file or directory.” Ack! What have I done wrong?!? By resetting the root password, have I changed the password on the account I’m trying to crack?
Also, the machine I’m trying to crack is running OS X 10.7.2. Thanks in advance for any help.
Hey, I have a problem. I reset the root password, and everything worked up until I restarted the computer. I can’t find a way to login to the root account, there is only the password entry box for the user, and two buttons labelled “guest” and “cancel”. If I click guest it just restarts the computer in a very simple user account in which you really can’t do anything at all. Perhaps there is a way to change the login method in single user mode?
I am new to Lion, but I managed to do it perfectly on Tiger. I am on Lion OSX. Let’s say that I don’t have administrator access, and am trying to log in as root. “Log into an administrator account that you have access to on the computer, or, if you don’t have access to one, select “Other” in the Login Window (only if you have User Account Pictures enabled), and enter “root” as the username, and then the password that you just set.” When I start up the computer and get to the login page, there isn’t any option for selecting “Other”.
I believe that the User Account Pictures are enabled. Is there any way of logging in as root? Hey, I did this before to gain root access and undo the parental controls that were severely impacting the use of my iMac. Now, when I go to login as “root”, it tells me my password is incorrect, and parental controls are enabled. Is it possible my father did the same thing I did? Also, I tried to do the hack myself, and I do everything right, but when I type in “passwd”. It says “The daemon encountered an error processing request.”.
Can you give me any pointers to bypass this? I really appreciate your help for people like me, suffering the cruelty of restrictions. Is it possible he enabled a Firmware password?
Well I got through everything to test out my password. The only problem is that I cannot confirm whether or not it’s working since I know my password is 14 characters and even after i set the minimum and maximum password length ( -m 13 -M14) and it starts at 1 digit passwords up to 12 and it stays there for up to two hours. I tried to dump the hash to John the ripper but it only supports up to 8 characters long even after changing the config file. Any suggestions? I don’t give up until the problem is solved and I like these kinds of problems. Thanks for any advice.
Im a complete noob, and i got it working, it starts to crack the password but then it stopes while cracking it. The exact text i get is this: sudo./dave -u cadmin Password: Thread 1: Started dictionary attack.
(english.txt) Thread 2: Started 1 digit passwords Thread 2: Started 2 digit passwords Thread 3: Started 3 digit passwords Thread 4: Started 4 digit passwords Thread 2: Started 5 digit passwords Thread 3: Started 6 digit passwords Thread 1: Started dictionary attack. (rockyou-75.txt) Thread 1: Dictionary attack failed. Thread 1: Started 7 digit passwords Thread 4: Started 8 digit passwords then it stops, its been like than for an hour or so, can anyone help me?
Arabic pdf ocr linux. This product is an add-on module that may be added on to certain qualifying base LEADTOOLS SDKs. Premium support via telephone is also available on a per-case basis or included with an. A development license also includes via email and chat. Note: Deployment Licenses must be purchased for each copy of the resulting application that is installed, distributed, or otherwise deployed.
To be free, this is one of the most straight forward methods I have seen for acquiring data from a Programmable Logic Controller. Below is a step by step rundown on how to do it. As many of you know the Micrologix 1100, 1400, and 1500 have a new data logging feature that allows is acquire data from these units using only the and, both which are downloadable free of charge from Allen Bradley’s website. Allen bradley micrologix 1500 software.
Hi i have been trying many things to try and gain access to an administrator account, i’m using the os x lion I open up single user mode and type the command: /sbin/mount -uw / Then i type out the next command: launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist I then type the command: passwd And when i go to change the password of the root account no letters come up as i type and even when i press enter twice for both prompts it tells me the account is disabled and I cannot make changes or something along those lines? Someone please help me!
Share this story A password-cracking expert has unveiled a computer cluster that can cycle through as many as 350 billion guesses per second. It's an almost unprecedented speed that can try every possible Windows passcode in the typical enterprise in less than six hours. The five-server system uses a relatively new package of virtualization software that harnesses the power of 25 AMD Radeon graphics cards. It achieves the 350 billion-guess-per-second speed when cracking password hashes generated by the NTLM cryptographic algorithm that Microsoft has included in every version of Windows since Server 2003. As a result, it can try an astounding 95 8 combinations in just 5.5 hours, enough to brute force every possible eight-character password containing upper- and lower-case letters, digits, and symbols. Such password policies are common in many enterprise settings. The same passwords protected by Microsoft's LM algorithm—which many organizations enable for compatibility with older Windows versions—will fall in just six minutes.
The Linux-based GPU cluster runs the, which allows the graphics cards to function as if they were running on a single desktop computer., a freely available password-cracking suite optimized for GPU computing, runs on top, allowing the machine to tackle at least 44 other algorithms at near-unprecedented speeds. In addition to brute-force attacks, the cluster can bring that speed to cracks that use a variety of other techniques, including dictionary attacks containing millions of words. 'What this cluster means is, we can do all the things we normally would with Hashcat, just at a greatly accelerated rate,' Jeremi Gosney, the founder and CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. 'We can attack hashes approximately four times faster than we could previously.' Gosney unveiled the machine last week at the in Oslo, Norway. He previously used a computer equipped with four AMD Radeon HD6990 graphics cards that could make about 88 billion guesses per second against NTLM hashes. As Ars previously reported in a feature headlined ',' Gosney used the machine to crack 90 percent of the 6.5 million password hashes belonging to users of LinkedIn.
In addition to the power of his hardware, his attack was aided by a 500 million-strong word list and a variety of advanced programming rules. Using the new cluster, the same attack would move about four times faster. That's because the machine is able to make about 63 billion guesses against SHA1, the algorithm used to hash the LinkedIn passwords, versus the 15.5 billion guesses his previous hardware was capable of.
The cluster can try 180 billion combinations per second against the widely used MD5 algorithm, which is also about a four-fold improvement over his older system. The speeds apply to so-called offline cracks, in which password lists are retrieved by hackers who exploit vulnerabilities on website or network servers. The passwords are typically stored using one-way cryptographic hash functions, which generate a unique string of characters for each unique string of plaintext. In theory, hashes can't be mathematically reversed. The only way to crack them is to run guesses through the same cryptographic function. When the output of a particular guess matches a hash in a compromised list, the corresponding password has been cracked.
Aug 28, 2014 root@host [~]# yum install xpdf antiword Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * addons: centos.mirror.iweb.ca * base: centos.mirror.iweb.ca * extras: mirror.science.uottawa.ca * updates: centos.mirror.iweb.ca Excluding Packages in global exclude list Finished Setting up. Yum install xpdf centos.
The technique doesn't apply to online attacks, because, among other reasons, most websites limit the number of guesses that can be made for a given account. The advent of GPU computing over the past decade has contributed to huge boosts in offline password cracking. But until now, limitations imposed by computer motherboards, BIOS systems, and ultimately software drivers limited the number of graphics cards running on a single computer to eight.
Gosney's breakthrough is the result of using VCL virtualization, which spreads larger numbers of cards onto a cluster of machines while maintaining the ability for them to function as if they're on a single computer. 'Before VCL people were trying lots of different things to varying degrees of success,' Gosney said. 'VCL put an end to all of this, because now we have a generic solution that works right out of the box, and handles all of that complexity for you automatically. It's also really easy to manage because all of your compute nodes only have to have VCL installed, nothing else.
You only have your software installed on the cluster controller.' The precedent set by the new cluster means it's more important than ever for engineers to design password storage systems that use hash functions specifically suited to the job. Unlike, MD5, SHA1, SHA2, the recently announced SHA3, and a variety of other 'fast' algorithms, functions such as, and SHA512crypt are designed to expend considerably more time and computing resources to convert plaintext input into cryptographic hashes. As a result, the new cluster, even with its four-fold increase in speed, can make only 71,000 guesses against Bcrypt and 364,000 guesses against SHA512crypt.
For the time being, readers should assume that the vast majority of their passwords are hashed with fast algorithms. That means passwords should never be less than nine characters, and using 13 or even 20 characters offers even better security. But long passwords aren't enough. Given the prevalence of cracking lists measured in the hundreds of millions, it's also crucial that passwords not be names, words, or common phrases. One easy way to make sure a passcode isn't contained in such lists is to choose a text string that's randomly generated using or another password management program.
Slides of Gosney's Passwords^12 presentation are. Promoted Comments. Smack-Fu Master, in training. I don't understand how any password system allows that many sequential guesses. If you fail 100+ times, what are the chances you are trying to crack it? Like the story says, this is all for offline attacks. The first step would be getting access to a list of all the hashed passwords and the associated login name and email.
Once you have this you don't have to worry about tripping any server side security as you already have the data and don't need to talk to the original server. You then take this offline, point your super duper password cracking machine at the list, hit go, and wait as the fun begins. 5 posts registered Jan 19, 2012. Smack-Fu Master, in training.
Would a 20 character password really take that much longer to crack than an eight character password? I was under the impression that the generated hashes were all of a uniform length - meaning that a 20 character password could conceivably have an 8 character counterpart that generates the same hash. I remember reading something about MD5 having exactly that flaw. I understand that the odds of that happening are simply too high to fathom, but it is conceivable for a 20 character password to be cracked well before the the guesses even reach that length, yeah? This is a common misconception, that when we crack hashes we are really trying to find collisions. Single block collisions are extremely rare. For MD5, only one single block collision has been found.
No single block collisions have been found for any of the SHA algorithms. So for all intents and purposes, no, we are not trying to find a collision. Every time you add a character to your password, you are exponentially increasing the difficulty it takes to crack via brute force. For example, an 8-char password has a keyspace of 95^8 combinations, while a 20-char password has a keyspace of 95^20 combinations. However, this ONLY applies to brute force attacks. If your password is weak it does not matter how long it is, as it will likely fall to other attacks such as wordlist and rule-based attacks. We regularly crack pass phrases that are 15 to even 100 chars long because they are too simple.
Last edited by on Sun Dec 09, 2012 6:46 pm 51 posts registered Aug 21, 2012. Smack-Fu Master, in training. Every time you add a character to your password, you are exponentially increasing the difficulty it takes to crack via brute force. For example, an 8-char password has a keyspace of 95^8 combinations, while a 20-char password has a keyspace of 95^20 combinations. Thanks, I was wondering where the 95 came from and why it wasn't shown as 6.6.10^18 or similar.
The '95' comes from the standard 95 characters on a US keyboard. 26 upper, 26 lower, 10 digit, 33 special chars. Using extended ASCII or Unicode chars increases the keyspace. But, it should be noted that using these characters doesn't necessarily make your password any more difficult to crack.
51 posts registered Aug 21, 2012. Smack-Fu Master, in training. While this seems really impressive what kind of difference does this actually mean? It seems that there is only a 4-fold increase which while significant doesn't really seem to be a game-changer.
If a password can be cracked in 5.5 hours using the new system then people were still screwed after 22 hours under the old system. You make a great point, which I will gladly address. The real threat comes not from quicker brute force attacks, but from greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to run more complex attacks. The 5.5 hours mentioned in the article is how long it takes to exhaust an 8 character password through brute force. This is all well and good, but we just use brute force times as a benchmark because it's the most comprehensible metric. As most Ars readers will note, brute force is almost always a last resort for us. We have lots of other tricks up our sleeves which help us to get longer, more complex passwords than are possible through brute force, including rule based attacks, combinator attacks, and hybrid attacks.
The faster we can compute a hash, the more complex the attacks are that we can throw at it. For super fast hashes such as MD4, MD5, SHA1, SHA2, and even SHA3, we are virtually unlimited in the types of attacks we can run. We can throw tens of gigabytes of words at the hash, running each word through permutation filters and rules engines, even running complex combinations of attacks without really having to worry about how long each attack would take to complete. So what this really means for the average person is that not only are short-to-average passwords guaranteed to fall in a short amount of time, but also longer, more complex passwords fall in a quarter of the time it previously took.
51 posts registered Aug 21, 2012. Wise, Aged Ars Veteran.
For passwords I can paste into a field (apps, web sites) I use 1Password generally creating passwords 12-20 characters in length depending on what is supported. For passwords I have to reamember and type in manually, computer accounts generally, I pick a word.
Uppercase one of the letters (but not the 1st) then append a string of 4 random characters that includes numbers and special characters. That string is the same of random characters everytime, just the 1st word changes. I typically follow themes for picking the word.
One computer may use the names of rivers, or states, or something i'm not telling you. Since the random characters are the same everytime I don't have to struggle to remember them. Because of this I'll most likely bump the random characters to 5 but otherwise keep the same method. The important part of passwords currently is simply length and the padding I use, plus using 4-6 character base words, makes the length pretty good. Making it 'look' random using some obscure method isn't anymore secure than my method.
Dictionary attacks are geared towards 1 or 2 characters appended (or prepended) to a dictionary word (usually! Or 1!) not 4-5 random characters. 121 posts registered May 23, 2007.
If you saw the recent press coverage about the hackers who managed to breach Sony's systems, you'll know that they managed to discover millions of users' passwords which were stored in the systems' databases in an unencrypted form. Most reputable systems, including Windows itself, store your password in an encrypted form, and there's no way to reverse that encryption to discover the original password. The only option is to simply try every possible combination, in what's known as a brute force attack. Trouble is, computers are very good at doing brute force attacks, and a decently powerful desktop computer can try tens of millions of combinations every second. Ironically, the biggest improvement to password-cracking software in recent years has come about because of the availability of hugely powerful graphics cards.
With the right software, the chips that normally render 35 fps of Grand Theft Auto 9 can now crack passwords instead. So now you know why security experts always tell you to choose a long, complicated password, which preferably contains numbers and punctuation characters rather than just letters. Because a password which consists of a combination of entries from a 26-character repertoire (a-z) is much easier to crack than if the range of characters is 52 (a-z and A-Z) or 62 (including digits too). If you've ever wondered just how secure your favourite password is, here's a simple web site that will tell you.
Just go to and start typing. As you type, the indicator is updated after every character to tell you, approximately, how long a desktop PC would typically take to crack it. Are you worried yet? Please rate this article.