Thursday 6 July 2006

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Recovering 'lost' or 'forgotten' Windows passwords

Give me a second to catch my breath...

Much obliged. Here I am sprawled out before a computer quivering from a mixture of exertion and trepidation. Sporting my Milk Tray, all-black, covert ops gear - with the aid of a set of ankle and wrist suction cups - I've just scaled the dizzying pinnacle of an office block, delicately scored and removed a section of glass and sneaked inside.

Still clamped between my teeth is a CD; it's an 'Ophcrack Live CD', "the fastest Windows password cracker". As I remove it from the opaque, foil-sealed packaging, the angel-devil tag team perched on my shoulders begin to quarrel over the pros and cons of inserting it into my office computer's CD drive to 'recover' the administrative password.

Not being privy to this information is seriously hampering my ability to perform all sorts of trivial operations such as installing the driver for my new printer and the Java plugin for Firefox. I'd be embarrassed to call tech support and have them traipse all the way over here just to enter the admin password. Besides, I'm sure they have more pressing matters to attend to... like watching rapping chimps on YouTube.

Actually, that's only half the battle. On several occasions I've bumped into one of the techies who happened to already be over here on an unrelated mission and asked them to do the honours, leaving them to get on with it while I'm away. When I got back, nothing had changed so I presume they were inadvertently distracted by a YouTubian limbo-dancing giraffe.

So you see my predicament. Do I keep on badgering the techies every time I need a 'i' dotting or a 't' crossing, or throw caution to the wind, run the Ophcrack Live CD and risk being lynched by the IT department's elite SWAT team?

That looked suspiciously like REM transpiring between the gap in my blinds. I'm outta here...

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