I have always known Windows was insecure but I expected the latest version to be more secure.

Job on a Windows PC with a lost Admin password,it is easy to change the Admin password by booting from a specialst rescue CD however this time I just stuck a bootable Linux pasword cracker cd in and boot from it.

Admin password cracked in 10 seconds.
all other login passwords about 2 minutes.

[Edited on 19/1/08 by britishtrident]

I'm in the computer industry, mainframe specialist.. the frightening thing is more and more businesses are turning to WINTEL as the compute platform of choice!

I'd rather see my financial info stored on a nice secure mainframe than one of these toys.

Hold on, you're using a consumer system, load a specialist program and complain when it does its job?????

let me guess, you think its terrible that a garage can plug in a diagnostic program and find out what is wrong with your ECU!

As for where my financial data is stored - thats a different question, but all major recent security leaks have been due to PEOPLE making mistakes, posting disks, losing laptops etc.

I know I'm in the minority, sticking up for Windows.

I've heard about the disk that lets you crack the admin password, but from what I heard it only lets you change the password, it doesn't actually tell you what the password is. It may seem like a security hole, but I'm pretty sure the same trick works on linux/unix too. The OS security is only part of the security equation, i.e. to use the boot disk you have to be able to get physical access to the machine, and it has to allow booting from removeable media.

I'm not by any means trying to say that Windows is perfect, far from it, but considering the install base and the number of people actively trying to hack it, it doesn't do that bad a job. I would bet if Linux was more widely used, the security holes in that would be found thick and fast.

Cheer

Scott

This dosen't reset the admin pword it cracks all the pwords (ie all users remote & local) in the sam file in a few seconds.

[Edited on 19/1/08 by britishtrident]

The way windows stores its passwords uses notoriously weak encryption. They don't salt the password which means a password encrypted on any windows machine will always be the same. This makes the very easy to crack using precomputed rainbow tables.

The last time I looked the average time to crack was 13.6 seconds which is unforgivable on anything pretending to be secure

Ive used this disk before where i used to work, managed to crack the Domain admins password in a few minutes, i could then access any PC/Server or MSSQL server(NT auth was turned on!) on the corperate WAN!, its quite interesting some of the files people will keep on their personal shares!

Granted this was because i had physical access to a local server, its still just silly the way windows SAM password encription works.