In order to protect important data, we use a large variety of methods and technologies, especially when the data in question is confidential and essential for day-to-day operations of a business and for making important management decisions. "If you have the information, you own the world" has become the basic tenet of our times, where control over data is of the utmost significance. The loss of access to important data can have a very negative impact on the company’s business.
An effective approach to
restoring system access
in Windows
whitepaper
Copyright (c) 2007 ElcomSoft Co.Ltd.Contents
Introduction 3
Everyone loses passwords 4
What are the consequences of losing a system password? 5Potential costsWhy not simply reset the password?
How to restore system access? 6Available solutionsUsing a WinPE bootable diskFree solutions based on Linux/UNIX
Elcomsoft System Recovery - a simple way to restore system access 8Key featuresSpecial features of Elcomsoft System Recovery
About ElcomSoft 13
An effective approach to restoring system access in Windowswhitepaper 2Introduction
In order to protect important data, we use a large variety of methods and technologies, especial-ly when the data in question is confidential and essential for day-to-day operations of a business and for making important management decisions.
"If you have the information, you own the world" has become the basic tenet of our times, where control over data is of the utmost significance. The loss of access to important data can have a very negative impact on the company's business.
It is under these conditions that any system administrator in the corporate setting is occasionally faced with the problem of restoring access to a client computer, resulting from the loss of the operating system password.
Unfortunately, this kind of problem is frequently resolved by the administrator using the brute force method, without using any special software for resetting and restoring passwords. The subject of this white paper is how to properly and more effectively resolve such problems.
An effective approach to restoring system access in Windowswhitepaper 3Everyone loses passwords
Setting a system password is one of the most common, and as we tend to believe, the safest meth-od for protecting data from unauthorized users. As is often the case, this too has a downside.
Our goal is to set a "difficult" password, to make it harder to guess and gain unauthorized system access, but then we forget it, and find ourselves in an awkward situation, caught in a trap of our own making. After this, we may have completely lost system access.
Life is full of unpredictable twists and turns: the system user may, for example:
.??forget the password, having made it too complicated and become unable to remember it after a business trip or a vacation;.??make a mistake when changing the password, having entered the wrong character, followed the wrong scheme, or selected too complex a variant from the outset;.??be obstructive, pretending to have "lost" the password (for example, before dismissal, if there had been a conflict with company management or coworkers);.??leave the company or disappear without leaving system access information, (due to negli-gence or intentionally in retaliation to the employer).
When no other accounts exist in the system, due to security measures, and this is most often the case, the system becomes fully inaccessible.
The loss of a system password is especially inconvenient, since it results in loss of access not only to one or several files, applications, and services, but it puts an entire workstation out of use, with all of the associated consequences.
An effective approach to restoring system access in Windowswhitepaper 4What are the consequences of losing a system password?
Potential costs 1Research conducted by Datamonitor showed, that internal costs for one request for assistance from the company helpdesk with regard to problems with passwords, are between USD 10 and USD 40 (depending on the size of the company). On average, USD 25 or 57 minutes of time spent on resolving the issue by a qualified IT professional every day. Over the course of a year, the average costs exceed USD 150 thousand for large companies with over two thousand em-ployees.
But this includes only expenses related to the time spent by hired IT professionals, not counting the costs resulting from the interruption of other business processes, potential loss of contract and reputation.
The problem is not as critical if the password in question is for an "empty" workstation of an aver-age company manager. Here, the losses may be limited to the time spent by the system admin-istrators on restoring the system to its original state and partial revenue l... [download for more]
