Hey guys. I’m new to Linux and I’m running Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon. Yesterday I have f*cked up. I was testing things in users and geve myself standart priveledges insted of Admin ones I had from beggining and then restarted PC. I then tried log back into users tab and change myself back to Admin but even tho the password is correct It says that it is not. /So at this point there is only one user in PC who has standart privliedges and no Admin./ I then tried to access root via terminal and this time It said that I don’t have permision to do that. And this is where I’m at right now. Please help get back my admin privliedges.
Edit: Issue is fixed. I started GRUB and changed my password which fixed the whole issue. Once again big Thank you to everyone who gave me tips and also big thank you to the guy who started posting about rowing machines. You all wonderful.
If an attacker has physical access then you’re already screwed in most cases.
Pretty much. Even if an attacker can’t boot your system, if they have physical access they can just pull your hard drive and mount it on a system they can boot. Only encryption can prevent this. Linux security was originally meant for keeping unprivileged accounts on multiuser systems from messing things up for others on the same machine. It can stretch to some other use cases, but is not a panacea for everything.
And even password based disk encryption can be defeated with 2-3 physical accesses if an organization wants to hard enough. Keyloggers can be very, very sneaky.
At that point you’d have to roll something like Yubikey-based disk encryption to be safe, because this re-establishes control over some physical parts of the system. Until they find the backup Yubikey you had to not lose all data by losing the primary key you’re carrying around to maintain control over it.
It’s not a battle the defending side can win.
