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couch1potato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
I installed ophcrack to a usb flash drive and cracked my ex-gf’s windows password. No special knowledge except I googled how to crack a windows password. This was about 13 years ago though, no idea if that’s still a thing.
viking@infosec.pub 13 hours ago
Nah that was Windows XP, where the hard drive was not encrypted by default, and the password was stored in a hashed file on the computer itself, freely accessible via any boot stick. Actually cracking it still took some time (below 7 characters a few minutes, 7 about 1h, 8 chars up to 24h, longer… LONG). But if it was a common word, then a dictionary attack with a long enough word list (most word lists have like 400k words or so) would get it in seconds either.
The funny thing with Windows XP was that since none of the data was encrypted, you could simply delete the password hash and set a flag in the registry and you would boot right into Windows with no password at all, and were then prompted to set a new password. That didn’t work since Windows 7 anymore.