
Forgot your Windows 98 password? No problem - nerdhard
http://imgur.com/fqjnK
======
yrro
Was this login screen ever intended to be a security barrier? This bypass
method doesn't give you access to the network resources after all, and Windows
9x never had any kind of local security in the first place...

------
AlyssaRowan
…or, if I recall correctly, you could just press _Esc_.

~~~
M4v3R
Only of the computer doesn't belong to a domain, otherwise you would get an
error, as in the OP when he clicked "Cancel".

------
kybernetyk
Wow, blast from the past. Reminds me of how we "outsmarted" our admins at the
school back then to get around the limitations they put up.

OLE[1] and MS Office were very valuable allies back then ;)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding)

~~~
agumonkey
more is less

------
300bps
Was this zero day exploit released under Google's automatic 5,840 day
disclosure rule?

------
nly
This brings back memories of installing DOOM into the printer spool folder
because it was the one place on the hard drive that anybody could write to.
Also stole an admin password or two back in high school because keyloggers,
which weren't even installed with local admin privileges, were perfectly
capable of logging keystrokes heading for the login prompt.

At least we've moved beyond this level of naivety these days.

~~~
Keyframe
Old days war story. In the early 90s we had a computer center (we still do)
here where we could all use computers if we were with an academic or school
institution. This was a few years before web, around 1992. I think.

This primarily consisted of a single SPARCstation with SunOS 4.x. and a bunch
of VT320 terminals (and a few IBM ones). I was in grade school, there were
high schoolers here and there and mostly people in college using systems for
primarily IRC and gopher.

I was learning C at the time and heavily into graphics programming so I wanted
to use as much system resources as possible - which of there weren't many. So
I had this cunning plan where I wrote a simple (I was grade school) C program
that basically malloced as much memory in a loop as it could get and kept it.
I figured that there was no quota for memory as there were for hard disk
space. I ran the program I wrote into background (&) to get the process id and
waited.

Program ate all the available memory and, presumably, started trashing the
swap until all of the running processes were extremely slow and/or
unresponsive. I watched as people around the room started to close their
programs (IRC, gopher mostly) and gave up on using the system. As soon as most
of them were gone, I killed the program with pid I had before. It was so
effective even things like ls wouldn't work, only kill. I know it was a dick
move, but I was a kid and even kind of proud of what I did back then.

------
bithush
Windows 9x just stored your password in a pwl file. All you had to do to
"hack" into an account was rename this file and it would accept any new
password. Of course Windows 9x had no file system security and this hack
didn't give you any network resource access but you could brute force the pwl
file if you really wanted too. Although it did require quite a bit of CPU for
the time obviously.

------
saalaa
Fortunately, Windows Me fixed all those issues.

~~~
outside1234
Unfortunately, it also broke everything else. :)

------
Cthulhu_
Reminds me of how we had Windows 98 computers at school which required an
administrator password to access the internet, else the system was limited to
a few applications. We managed by opening a text editor or Word or whatever,
file -> open, right-click a file, Explore which gave you access to the file
system. Typing in an URL in the address bar changed windows explorer to
internet explorer (a feature which MS later had to pay a fine and a browser
selection window for), and huzzah, internets!

------
pikucom
Win7 bypass is fairly similar with the change of utilman to cmd.

------
htor
Jesus.

Just how incompetent were the people behind this OS?

