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My mom's Vista Home Premium (32 bit) password was changed. My mom said that she didn't change it and she doesn't think anyone else here did either. So.. Could this have been done remotely?

I'm running Ophcrack now, what else can we do? (I haven't tried safe mode yet.) I'm a techie and somewhat baffled. Help!

Edit:

ophcrack found empty LM but no NT hash is displayed. Entering safe mode...

Edit2:

I'm an idiot. Well sort of. Ophcrack could not crack the password which was just lowercase English letters, but for some reason, I was able to login using the orignal password in safe mode. Once in safe mode I "changed the password" back to it's original value and was then able to login in regular mode... It's time to run a virus scan.

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2 Answers 2

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Passwords can be changed remotely, e.g. using http://www.bo2k.com/whatis.html

If you suspect that really happened (i.e. caps lock is not pressed, the language is correct, the keyboard is OK and password was not forgotten), then it might mean your computer is compromised otherwise (e.g. have an installed rootkit), so unless you are confident you can solve that - a complete re-install might be better than simply regaining control over it.

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  • Not alsure what it was, but problem solved and your answer makes sense so check, plus one. Thanks.
    – Moshe
    Mar 5, 2010 at 4:22
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If you were to have this problem again, I would advise on using KON-BOOT , it bypasses all windows password checking, so you can boot to windows and change the password. Its like a live cd that boot prior to windows and tricks it when asked for the password.

Great tool for hacking your own box (you can only change the pass, you can't see the oldo one)

From the site:

Kon-Boot is an prototype piece of software which allows to change contents of a linux kernel (and now Windows kernel also!!!) on the fly (while booting).

In the current compilation state it allows to log into a linux system as 'root' user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password.

It was acctually started as silly project of mine, which was born from my never-ending memory problems :) Secondly it was mainly created for Ubuntu, later i have made few add-ons to cover some other linux distributions.

Finally, please consider this is my first linux project so far :)

Entire Kon-Boot was written in pure x86 assembly, using old grandpa-geezer TASM 4.0.

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