Chuck's Blog

ettercap is a little tool I’ve been playing with the past few days, along with metasploit. For anyone who has never heard of either of these tools, give them a shot in a test environment. What they can do is pretty scary stuff.

And yes, I do not care if you know my internal network IP for my laptop. Or one of freenode’s servers for that matter. However, in the last few examples I blurred out my IRC nick and MAC addresses, because I do care about those.

We’ve all done it. Plug in a password, think we’ll remember it a month from now, and have our memory betray us. With most Linux distros you can just pop in a livecd and change the password, providing you did not use some sort of full disk encryption, but for Windows Vista and Windows 7 things can get more complicated.

You can purchase the Microsoft solutions to this problem, but if you’re like me you would prefer a free solution. SystemRescueCd is this solution.

Just burn the cd, boot from it (type rescuecd at the boot prompt) and wait. When you get a shell prompt just follow its instructions to mount your windows partition, and enter the system32 directoryand look for a file named “SAM”. Once you’ve found it just type chntpw -u <user> /path/to/SAM and follow its instructions. Reboot cleanly, and voila.

One thing I have noticed though is that sometimes chntpw cannot change Vista passwords. If this is the case for you just set the password blank, log in under windows, and change it there.

Well, it appears KDX is finally dead. Haxial software pulled the plug on themselves. From their homepage:

Unfortunately, the Haxial Software company is unable to continue operation, and has suspended itself.

The software is no longer being distributed or sold, and technical support is no longer provided.

Tis a sad day. For anyone who doesn’t know already, KDX was a bulletin board like chatting system. It may have never grown as popular as Hotline, but it did excel in many ways. It was actually very useful for moving files between Linux, Windows, and Mac OS 9/X without having to resort to FTP.

Ah well, farewell KDX, and good luck former Haxial employees.