Okay, let's see how many smartass comments I get off this one (you guys crack me up...). I work for a pretty big credit card company, so the computers are pretty tight at work. They are all connected of course, and somewhere a few are hooked up to the internet. I'm not interested in breaking it to the credit card shit...I could care less about that. I just want full access to the computers. Here's the deal with the computers: they run Novell. I found out how to get into Explorer, so I have access to all the files on the chosen drive, however, everything is blocked by the system admin...I can do everything the general supervisors can do but that's not much. I have went in under safe mode, which gives me a little more access, but not much. I've figured out how to get into DOS (they run Windows 95) but everything is denied, it won't let me do anything from there. So basically I need to figure out how to get past the very restricted access that the admin has on the system....any ideas???

If you need more details on the system I can post them....

i know next to nothing about hacking.

If you get the sysadmins password you can usually create a root account for yourself from there.

I've tried brute forcing the admin password, but haven't had any lucj yet. I'm heading to work in a minute, so I'm going to give it another shot, probably with no luck...

if you work there, you should scope out his/her workspace for hints. if you cant find anything direct, like a sticky post it or something, you might be able to figure out whats important to him, and try variations on that.

Funny story:

The sysop at our school has three accounts, 01doejoh, which is a non-existent student's server, schutz, his teacher server, and sysop, the sysop server.

01doejoh's password was DDDDD, found by brute force. The account was closed down because of too much activity.

One day, the sysop took his grandkids to the orthodontist, and I was there in the waiting room waiting for my own appointment. His kid's name was Ernie. So I tried this and what do you know, the password to Schutz was Ernie. Later changed due to too much activity (noticing a pattern here?)

GHS99_00 was the sysop password, which someone found out by shoulder surfing. It was changed later, though, becuase someone fucked around on the account and denied the school internet access for a couple of days.

I guess if I were charles dickens I'd call that the Tale of Three Accounts, but he's dead and the accounts are all really tight security now.

I've tried researching but there isn't much...the only thing anyone knows about him is that he loves playing tennis, which I've tried everything I can think of there. I've gotten into his office once and looked everywhere...in drawers, behind draws, underneath everything, the underside of the desk, the chair....I looked everywhere and came up with nothing. He has nothing personal in his office that could tell me more about him.....I don't know what to try next...The computers go down every once in a while, but no one else has an admin password, so social engineering wouldn't work, and he is the one that fixes the systems, so reverse-social is out of the question as well....basically this is a really tough situation because all my options have been exhuasted.....

go

I have a program similar to that but guess what? A: drive is restricted as well....

sometimes passwords are just impossible to guess..

I know personally, that noone would ever be able to guess one of my passwords, it bears so little relationship to anything to do with me.. Even knowing me well, the only way you'd figure it out would be by me telling you. I don't write passwords down either, so brute force would be about the only way to get mine.. This guy is probably the same.

do you have access to the registry?

Well if you have physical access to your computer you can do the following:

Create a boot disk at home and use it on the computer. Even though they will probally have booting off of the floppy turned off, you could always go into the CMOS setup utility.
The only problem is that it is most likely password protected. This shouldn't be much of a problem. Just note the make of the BIOS when the system boots up and find a util that retrieves the password from the bios (yes, they do exist, but i dont know if they do for you model.) You could put this on your bootdisk it shouldn't take up too much space. They way the utility should work is once your in windows or whatever you run the utility giving it a file as a parameter. Then it reads your CMOS RAM for the password and stores it in the file you specify. Then you can get into the CMOS, make it do an on boot floppy seek. Save, exit the bios. Insert your boot disk and it should boot off your disk with the command interpreter of that disk.

Or if you know something about the motherboard design they usually have jumpers right next to the CMOS IC and the battery. You can just pull that turn on the CPU, then shut it off. Put the jumper back into its place, and turn it back on. Then the whole CMOS RAM should be cleared.

Those are 2 methods i have used to get my own computer back when my bro put a CMOS password on my computer. The second time i had to get a password off of his computer, becuase he forgot it. Im like dont forget it next time!

Also remember that you shouldn't run windows because your access will be restricted once you run win.com. This means you might have to press F8 when your floppy is booting up. When booting up and you have pressed F8 a menu should popup. Select run in MS-DOS mode only or something to that affect.

Remember this will only give you access to YOUR machine, no one elses. Also no networking will be up and no convieances will be running you'll just have pure DOS.

If none of this works for you which can be possible, i don't know what else i can tell you.

Jaded...no, I don't...it says I am not authorized (I've tried)....and soullace...thanks for the advice...I'll try that. Hopefully I will figure something out...Anyone else know of anything I can try? I just got home from work a little bit ago - another 6 hours of screwin' around in the system, what little I can anyways....

I hope it works out for you because those are pretty old techniques (as far as computers go.) I would also no suggest trying to flood the CMOS (i.e. remove the jumper.) There are too many problems associated with this.

And as i tell my bro: a computer isn't really that secure if the person trying to get in can physically mount the hard disk :]