Sensible computer users will always advise you that protecting your user account on your Windows installation with a password is a very important thing to do. And of course, that is correct to help protect and secure private and important data from other users that have access to the same machine. It isn’t the case anymore though that simply putting a password on your account will protect you and your files if someone is desperate enough to want to get in.

There are of course legitimate reasons for wanting to get around a user account password. I’ve lost count the number of times someone has left me with a PC to work on and gone off not telling me what the password is. Some users are so forgetful, they can’t even remember what their own password is, and you’d be surprised how many people actually do that. It’s not a major surprise really when there are possibly 10+ different passwords to remember while using your PC and online etc.
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Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com) is one of the oldest free email providers that is owned by Microsoft. Although Gmail has been really popular, many people still own a Hotmail account so that they’re able to use the services such as Windows Live Messenger, SkyDrive and etc that is being offered for free to their Live users. Hacking Hotmail account is not impossible but not really that easy as well as it requires a bit of patience and luck. The first method that would definitely work is to install a keylogger and steal the Hotmail login credentials. The guessing of the secret answer to the secret question set by the user is no longer effective because you need to fill up a bunch of questionnaire with the accurate answers to verify that you actually own the Hotmail account or else the request will be rejected.

The third and final method to crack a Hotmail password is by brute forcing with a wordlist or dictionary file. This method would be the best because the password will be retained and not reset which will not trigger the account owner’s attention while you can access and view the emails. Other than that, there are also many basic users that uses common passwords which can be easily cracked. There are many brute forcing tools that can be found on the Internet but most of them are either broken (not working) or infected by malware. We have found a script written by Adam Joseph that works and is safe to use.
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Forgetting your Windows password is not really something that happens too often, but it can happen. This is especially true if you are administering several computers because people who aren’t very computer savvy tend to think nothing of misplacing or not remembering their login password. Years ago this may have been a serious issue and could have resulted in deleting the account, but these days it’s not too much of a problem.

There are a number of different ways to either get around the user account password by using something like Kon-Boot which is a bootable CD that lets you get into Windows by temporarily entering anything as the password to logon. Or you could try a password cracker program that can hopefully find the original password for you. Ophcrack is one such program we have previously written about that you could try.

Other ways that we’ve talked about include “How to Hack Into a Windows XP Computer Without Changing Password” and “How to Recover Windows Login password within minutes” which are worth looking at. This article though, covers another method on how to get into Windows without knowing any Windows account password which is actually removing the password completely. This has an advantage of not revealing what the current password is, instead it simply deletes it so you can login without entering any password and can then create another personal password once in Windows.
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We have previously talked about how to Recover the Windows Login password within minutes which allows you to recover your Windows password online. Another method to login to a password protected Windows even if you do not have the password is by making Windows accept any password, and this is a far better way to get into Windows XP. It is easy and it does not reset the password which will definitely alert the administrator of the computer. Kon-Boot is another fantastic tool for doing this and there are free and paid versions available that will allow access to Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and even Linux without knowing the password. Kon-Boot is also present on the great Hiren’s Boot CD rescue disc.

There are also other useful methods getting into a password protected Windows such as cracking the password so you can find out what the real password is. Hacking into a computer running Windows XP without changing or resetting the password will allow you to find out all and any passwords on the machine (including admin accounts). You do not need access to any accounts to do this, but of course, do not perform this method on anyone else’s computer without proper authorization. The hacking method described below works only on Windows XP.
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There are many ways to login to a password protected Windows even if you do not know the password. You can reset the current password to a new password, make your Windows accept any passwords or decrypt the current password so you can login with the current password. Cracking the current password is the best method because it doesn’t reset and change the current password so no one would suspect anything. However this is also the most difficult method and can be very time consuming depending on the strength of the password. If the password is really long and contains uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols, it may take many years just to crack that password depending on the power of the machine that is used to run the decryption.

If you do not want to run the cracking tool on your computer for days/weeks/years in attempting to decrypt the user account password, you can do it at LoginRecovery where it provides an online service to help you decrypt the password just by uploading a XML file created by their LiveCD.
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Virtual Network Computing or mostly people just calls it VNC is a system to remotely control a computer as if you are sitting in front of the PC even though you are away from it. Although Windows comes with remote desktop feature that accomplishes the same thing as VNC, most server administrators still prefers to use VNC due to cross platform compatibility plus they are also free unless you are using the Personal or Enterprise version of RealVNC for extra security and features such as the deployment tool. The VNC comes in two modules which is the Viewer that is used to control the Server module.

Just like any other remote control software, the VNC server can be password protected to prevent unauthorized users from controlling the server. The password that is saved on the server is encrypted with DES but unfortunately the algorithm has already been cracked long ago. There are quite a number of third party tools that claims to automatically decrypt and display the VNC server password but most of them are not updated to work with the latest versions of VNC. From what we’ve tested, VNCPassView by Nirsoft can only display UltraVNC password, VNCPwdump by Patrik Karlsson failed to display RealVNC password with either the -s or -c switch, and VNC Password Decryptor too failed to fetch and decrypt VNC passwords on a local computer.

These automated VNC password recovery tool doesn’t work because the location of the DES encrypted password that is saved on the computer has changed and they are not updated to read from the new paths. Here we will guide you on how to locate the VNC encrypted password and also how to manually decrypt them either through web based or locally via command line tool.
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