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Right, So I actually did something similar. On some version of windows I noticed that ctrl-backspace was adding another character to the password, instead of deleting it. So I included it in my password. Then I updated to a new version of windows and got locked out since they updated the password backend to where it would actually delete the password instead of a adding the character, so I had no way of typing out my password. Ended up just nuking the computer.
Could have just researched what character was being inserted by the ctrl backspace and then used the keyboard to insert the character from its ascii or unicode code to login and then changed your password before nuking your computer
It looks like it was the ASCII char 127 (delete char). https://superuser.com/questions/33142/ctrlbackspace-inserts-a-small-box-instead-of-erasing
Or just cleared the SAM password altogether. Windows is trivially easy to break into if you have physical access and the volume isn’t encrypted.
My go-to solution is to simply replace some kind of accessibility feature executable, such as onscreen keyboard, with cmd.exe. It runs under SYSTEM.
Was that the same version of Windows where you could click “cancel” to bypass the login prompt?
early win98 and i think even into second edition you could just click the close window x button on the login window and it would just dump you onto the desktop. my parents thought adding a password would stop late night gaming… nope worked till i got discovered one fateful nigbt and i was grounded till i revealed how i found out what the password was.
was eye opening for my father who then started just taking the power cords off the monitor and psu.
My parents had the power cord in locked box, so you need a key to turn the computer on, which only they have.
Me and all my siblings learnt to pick lock.
I know, this is easier said than done for someone unfamiliar with this stuff, but maybe still good to know that this is an option in future:
You can prepare a “Linux Live USB” and select in the BIOS that it should boot off of that.
It’ll start a complete OS off of that USB, so you can access the hard drive (assuming you didn’t enable disk encryption) and at the very least backup your files, or sometimes even resolve whatever keeps you from accessing Windows.
Remember: Those were probably the times of a single computer at home and having a spare laptop somewhere ready for that is not the default.
I did actually remember that, but figured, they must have had some way of reinstalling Windows, too.
I guess, though, they might have had a physical Windows install disk at home. So, yeah, would have had to prepare a Linux Live CD before disaster struck…
You can also create a Windows installer USB stick, boot off of that, and start its command line to access the files on the installed Windows system. There you can copy CMD.exe over the file path of the accessibility options app.
Then boot back to your installed system’s login screen and hit the button for accessibility options, which now opens a working command line logged into the installed system with admin rights. You can use that to reset your admin password.
This hack has worked in some form since Windows 3.11 .
This sort of nonsense right here is why infosec people warn about having physical access to machines
My lemmy mobile client just crashed. This is me on the web interface, lol.
Doing that to annoy devs who didn’t sanitize their database inputs is like walking along parking lot just to see if anyone has forgotten to lock their car, just to put a post it in the steering wheel.
Nah man, not sanitizing Inputs could pose serious security risks as someone could use this shit to escape and run arbitrary database queries potentially leaking passwords or other info or just wiping it (Afa I have learnt on the internet)
Title text: My password is just every Unicode codepoint concatenated into a single UTF-8 string.
Now I want to try this.
