New Win XP Security Flaw
 

It's a little off topic, but a warning for anyone adminning Win XP computers...

There was a big thread on the last board I was on about being able to simply boot into runlevel 1 and get anything on the system. It started with somebody buying a computer off eBay and needing to get in and change the root password. People were going crazy about this; swearing up and down that it was the worst security they'd ever heard. They couldn't be convinced that boot-access to (almost) computer means you can get anything you want off it. Some even went so far as to say you could never do it in Win XP.

Well, there's a new article out. << HERE >> It says all you need to do is boot from a Win 2000 CD and go to the Recovery Console. You can then operate as Administrator without a password, and get any file off any user's account without a password. Pretty nice for the "most secure version ever" of Windows.

If a computer is not physically secure, it is insecure.

That's the first rule of security.

Security is a state of mind, not an operating system....

There are and always will be "backdoors" like this for "disaster recovery". Anything with an operating system has atleast one, including Cisco PIX boxes and routers, Novell servers, Enterprise UNIX servers, etc. Hand someone a keyboard and in capable hands it's toast. Watch any geek show during security week and they'll show you how to break in to stuff like this if you have access to it. This should not surprise anyone!

Well, not only "disaster recovery". Lotsa default login/passes are set up on install but aren't changed after. Where to find? I know at least one perfectly legal site exposing them (aprox 500 entries), the other went blank (1K entries).

//mod.note: Now if you mean PIX, do you mean the ISAKMP SA stuff?
Only interested clearing this up because w/o examples to go with your post it would mark you as a (potential) FUD spreader. I don't like that to happen here at LQ. We need to provide each others with *clear* problems and *clear answers.

Nope. Even easier than that. I don't want to be a "FUD spreader".

When I took my CCNA class we discussed how to reset the 'enable' password. Apparantly this is common knowledge and taught in EVERY CCNA class. We ended up discussing at length about this very topic. The presenter told us of numerous backdoors and their purposes including the PIX firewall.

As a side note, you can disable this backdoor, but most would discourage it, opting instead for physical isolation of the box.

Then clearing the cmos will take care of the bios password.

:eek: Did you know that Windows is more stable than Linux?

there's two way to look at this
 

I took this security flaw as a hint to completely reformat my drive and reinstall win2000 over xp... hey, it was already in the drive!

The only thing that could make that article more vague would be a "?" behind the title.

Translated quote from article:
"Uh, Windows could be more stable as long as you don't run any software on it and don't have any users, but we aren't going to admit it because we sell Linux too. Besides, we aren't too sure if it's more stable or not, so never mind."