Brute Force Program For Linux

[The Philanthropist]

At work we have linux running on some mininote laptops, but a unscrupulous customer has fucked our shit up with some password changing antics, and we need a brute force program that possibly includes special characters (@#$% etc) and numbers.

Any magical solution?

[jettlarue]

John the Ripper
http://www.openwall.com/john/

I have not used it so thats as far as I can assist you

[jrgp]

Yes, when you boot it, hit escape as soon as you see the Grub menu. Click the latest kernel with the "Recovery Mode" next to it. When/if it asks, tell it to drop you to a root terminal. From there, you have unlimited access to everything on the system. To change a user's password to whatever you want, run the following:
passwd USERNAME

And if you need to change root's password, just runn passwd without any arguments.

There's no need to bruteforce the hashes in /etc/shadow when you can easily do the above in less than a few minutes.

[Antipathy]

Yes, when you boot it, hit escape as soon as you see the Grub menu. Click the latest kernel with the "Recovery Mode" next to it. When/if it asks, tell it to drop you to a root terminal. From there, you have unlimited access to everything on the system. To change a user's password to whatever you want, run the following:
passwd USERNAME

And if you need to change root's password, just runn passwd without any arguments.

There's no need to bruteforce the hashes in /etc/shadow when you can easily do the above in less than a few minutes.

And I thought I was being geeky when I made a virtual image out of a music CD just so I could listen it on a PSX emulator.

The more you know... 

[N. Escalona]

... From there, you have unlimited access to everything on the system. ...

You've got to love an operating system where, by default, it takes only 3 sentences to get to that one above.
Of course, the alternatives are even worse.

[jrgp]

... From there, you have unlimited access to everything on the system. ...

You've got to love an operating system where, by default, it takes only 3 sentences to get to that one above.
Of course, the alternatives are even worse.

If you have physical contact to a computer running whatever operating system, getting full access to it is trivial.

However, if you do not have physical access to a computer running Linux, you can't get into it at all unless you know the username & password of an account on it and it has ssh running and there's a port forwarded. Otherwise no.

[a-4-year-old]

Theres nothing I hated more than username and password for linux. It was totally unnecessary and useless for me.

[FliesLikeABrick]

Yes, when you boot it, hit escape as soon as you see the Grub menu. Click the latest kernel with the "Recovery Mode" next to it. When/if it asks, tell it to drop you to a root terminal. From there, you have unlimited access to everything on the system. To change a user's password to whatever you want, run the following:
passwd USERNAME

And if you need to change root's password, just runn passwd without any arguments.

There's no need to bruteforce the hashes in /etc/shadow when you can easily do the above in less than a few minutes.

This only works if it is a ubuntu-like system where there's no root password and the root account is disabled by default.  If they have the account enabled/a password set, they won't be able to do it.

You can, however, by using a livecd+chroot craftily enough (boot a livecd of Ubuntu or something, make a directory, mount the root filesystem of the laptop's hard drive on the directory.  mount proc and dev in it, then chroot /mnt/target (where /mnt/target is where the laptop's main partition is mounted)  From there you can then passwd <username> to reset the password.