Re: can someone get admin password with physical access?

From: Khayman (khayman.nopigbottom@bigfoot.com)
Date: 02/27/02 

From: "Khayman" <khayman.nopigbottom@bigfoot.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 10:49:55 GMT

"t2k2p" <t2k2p@socal.rr.com> skrev i meddelandet
news:xcFe8.8388$1d4.2988243@twister.socal.rr.com...
> Hi, I help out the admin at my school with security, and we have very poor
> physical security of computers. Is there a way that any person with
> physical access hack the admin or other users password? I heard that you
> can use a linux boot disk to access a file and use l0ptcrack to crack it,
> but I heard that it only works for FAT32 partitions. Is this true? And if
> there is a way to hack the passwords if someone has physical access, how
can
> they do it? and is there a way to stop it? (besides physical security)
> thanks a lot.
>

l0phtcrack (or LC3) will crack your password no matter what filesystem it's
on (more or less) - what you heard of only fat32 is that to get the password
file l0phtcrack needs, you need to boot to dos with a dos bootdisk - and
then you can only see fat32 (since dos doesn't support ntfs)

However, there's a really simple little program that tends to drop some jaws
of some system administrators - ntfs2dos.
It will give you complete 100% (AFAIK) access to ntfs - takes a few minutes
to find on the web, and a second to run from a dos floppy....

Do like to others said - make sure the computers boot only from harddrive,
put a difficult bios password and lock the computer case.
On the extreme measures side - take away the floppy and alter the bios not
to complain about it.
If you believe your users still are able to open up the case - cut away the
jumper clips that allows you to reset the bios password.....

All this will only protect you from this way of using l0phtcrack - there are
more ways to use that program - sniffing for example...

Khay.

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