This process requires physical access to the console and an available floppy drive.

select the account whose password hash needs to be rewritten & enter a new password.The highest barrier is understanding unix media descriptors There are Linux boot disks that have DOS and NTFS filesystem drivers and software that will read the registry and rewrite the password hashes for any account including the Administrators. If you have a resource which needs to be protected, the single most important protection is to restrict physical access. Without physical security, there can be no security. Do you have auditing turned on so you can detect when a server has been turned off? Making it vulnerable to offline attacks. I strongly recommend you read my paper on how to protect this resource. A critical resource is the administrator's workstation. Given my experience as an NT systems admin and my experience hacking just such an environment, I will be writing white papers to help the NT admin protect his/her *ss. I guarantee that you will be shocked but its a better security practice to make penetration testing part of your yearly risk analysis than to wait until you have a real incident. If your organization has not brought in a team to do a full scope penetration test, you really have no idea how insecure and vulnerable your network really is to internal and external hackers. For core security issues see Wayne's Security Resources. In particular, depending on what you are searching for, you may want to check on my Penetration Testing Tip #12: Password Recovery Resources tip. This article kicked off my interest in Penetration Testing. If you are interested in these tools or procedures, I suggest download the code and print the procedures now (I have had to remove dead links from this page more than any other - this kind of data seems to disappear fast). Consider ElcomSoft for a commercial approach. There is something to be said for the comfort level of the commercial tools. I have had the most success with the Linux boot disks and a manual brute force dictionary attack using L0phtcrack. Those that attempt to overcome Syskey, in particular, seem risky.

Sometimes successfully and sometimes not. If you are really, really stuck - this tip may be for you. Any attempt to circumvent an OSs normal security can be disastrous. This tip is in the Administrators section.

Forgot windows server password