How-To Geek
How to Crack Your Windows Password: The Video Guide
We’ve already shown you how to crack your forgotten Windows password with the Ophcrack live CD, but for those that want to really understand the process, we’ve put together a video guide that will help you visually see how it all works.
In the above video we are able to boot into the live CD, crack our password, and log into Windows in under eight minutes. If you want a more in depth overview on how Ophcrack works make sure you check out the original article here:
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Comments (14)
Justin is a Linux and HTPC enthusiast who loves to try new projects. He isn't scared of bricking a cell phone in the name of freedom.
- Published 10/4/10
Your articles are excellent….just what everyone needs. One other thing l’d like to know is: How to delete protected FOLDERS and files within protected folders. I have a virus or something and need to get rid of a couple of files.
Final word, KEEP UP THE EXCELLENT WORK.
Thanks. Stan
You need 8 minutes to crack a Windows password and get in? Why can’t you just use ‘chntpw’ in any Linux distro?
Time taken to boot into LiveCD (with chntpw preinstalled) < 2 mins even on the slowest of hardware
Time taken to mount windows partition, open terminal and change/erase the password < 1 min
Reset the system – Do a hard reset by pressing the reset/power button
Time taken for Windows to boot up < 2 mins
Voila! No need to enter password at all. You're in.
This works even if the user had entered the world's most 'un-crackable' password.
That's 5 mins flat. No matter what. Satisfaction guaranteed…
@n0n-n00b
If you were paying attention, you’d realize that changing a password is not the same as cracking it. If you’re using encryption, for instance, changing the password will break the encryption.
That said, in the actual article we included links to our other articles on how to change the password with chntpw.
There was a time when discussing the topic of ‘password cracking’ was forbidden on HTG ;)
3 words dude :
Trinity Rescue Kit
Having been locked out of Vista I tried Ophcrack. But, there was no password used ( I just removed administrator privileges from the user account) so Ophcrack couldn’t do it’s magic. Hopefully next time I’ll have more luck after watching this video.
@Hatryst
Yeah, that’s true. This is white-hat cracking though, we’re not recommending that you crack your bosses’s password and use his credit card to sign him up for inappropriate magazines sent to the office. Would be funny, though.
Hi,
Will it work with windows 7 ??
Thanks
hello
I have Ophcrack live CD (iso file),i make a cd.But problem is when i boot the cd and iso image in Mircosoft virtul machine,it;s cant work,not boot from cd as well as iso image.What’s the problem and solouction
You should also tell people how cracking with bruteforce works.
As an example for bruteforce: if you have a password of 8 characters which contains, upper and lowercase characters, numbers and special characters every possibility will be checked, that means:
26 possible uppercase character + 26 possible lowercase character + 10 possible numbers + about 40 possible special characters = 102 characters for each index to check and in combination to other indexes makes about 1.17165938 × 10^16 combinations. You can calculate yourself for a password which is over 20 or more characters.
And to add more information to my post: doesn’t matter if you have an i7 extreme or whatever, secure passwords need a supercomputer to be crack. And even with a supercomputer it would take years to crack an aes encrypted password
The last time I forgot my password, I went in through the black F8 startup screen. It allowed me to override through admin. I am not very savvy, but was able to figure this much out.
You just need to create a Windows password reset disk to reset your lost or unknown Windows password. I have created one with the tool “Windows Password Breaker” and used it to reset my administrator password successfully.
It works….
y not to use Hiren Boot cd, damn that application is awesome, and its simple to use