Thursday 29 April 2010

Passwords you never created and never knew

Every so often the more technically-savy in a family are called on to help set-up a new computer when an old one begins to fail. Experience tells you that there are a number of things that you'll need to do as part of this process, but there's generally one or more things you forget to check for and have to fix later. It's seldom a single-session process.

Last weekend the main problem was an unknown password for an email account. In a scenario which can't be that uncommon, an email account had been established by a friend and the password for it remembered by the email client but no human being. Luckily we were able to salvage the password using one of these tools and restore access to the email via a new client on the new computer.

It seems all to possible that we will encounter this scenario with a depositor at some stage, so it's handy to have an easy fix for it. On the other hand, it's a little worrying how easy a fix it is...

1 comment:

pixelatedpete said...

I don't think I'll ever forget the day I used Ophcrack (http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/) to help a friend get back into his old laptop... (it really was his - when he logged in the wallpaper was a photo of his wedding!) It is about as close as it gets to films where the tech-guy goes "Wait a minute" and a progress bar grows while letters slot into place above! :-)