Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

Only under orders.

When I was in the Air Force, we were to enter a room to do periodic maintenance. Only the day lock (a five push-button job) had been changed. It was about 0230, and the lead was trying to decide if he should wake up the day shift supervisor or just put off the PMI. I informed him that I could go through the lock.

"Go ahead."

"Is that an order?"

"Yes." (grinning)

It took less than a minute.

Five button locks

Recently had one go intermittent and then completely fail. But we noticed a pattern... it would only fail when we were wet and cold. So we grabbed a blowtorch, a hammer, threw on some overalls and went to work "gently" heating the lock and providing percussive encouragement. Security patrol walked right by us, totally ignoring two men in somewhat battered clothing working on a lock with blowtorch and dead blow hammer. 2 min and we were in.

Locks...

All this talk of locks and security gone bad... This snap was taken on my way to work back a couple years.

https://i.imgur.com/dfQcpu5.jpg

As with most security, it's pointless if you don't think it through. And I do mean seriously think it through.

Sounds about where car manufacturers are right now with security

If your don't know your history employ someone who does, or you are bound to relearn the mistakes of the past.

So.. they had "secured" the pc by adding a line to autoexec.bat... lol

Then to secure the hole the changed a rom to stop you being able to abort it being loaded?

Wow that will take seconds to bypass with a boot floppy or taking the drive out and putting it in another machine.

I'd been moved into a new office, along with our filing cabinets. At some point the key to one of the cabinets vanished. So, I came in at the weekend with some tools and with reference to the openable cabinet discreetly peeled back a corner of the back panel and slid out the locking bar.

Microsoft XML crazed fever extend to games.

Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3 and Age of Empires 3 had all the game variables in XML files.

Things like "points of contact" of aircraft. 3 points with Z= 0 are the landing gear. Delete all the others and enjoy your nigh-invulnerable plane. Delete these 3 and watch the airplanes cross the airfield floor and explode when they go underground, even before the game begins.

Age of Empires 3 had all the variables spelled out, like TrebuchetAttackForce = 20 or something like that. Replace that 20 with 255 or 65536 and watch all your enemies buildings crumble beneath a single catapult attack. But I think that on AoE 3 only the heroes were identified, so if you changed one of these generic attack units, they would change for BOTH sides, so you could mod your game to your heart's content, knowing that your enemies would get the upgrade too... with hilarious results.

Old IBM Aptiva PCs

If you had one of those, you just booted off an IBM-pressed Windows 95 disk to format your machine and reinstall all the factory drivers. It formats and then decompress several zip files, not an actual installation, more like an image. (It beats having those in several floppies, back then.)

I lost/damaged the drivers of its unique winmodem, and sure enough they were in a password-protected .zip file inside that disk. But no password available, even in the manual there was no option for a partial restore, I'd have to REFORMAT the whole thing to get it going. It didn't ask for a password if you formatted it off the bat, however.

Cue zip cracker for DOS. First attempt, only lowercase, 8 digits. Pentium 100 MHz gauged 2 million attempts per second.... off to lunch.

The password is "magic".

If you got old IBM hardware and install disks on passworded zip files, try that. Why would they put their own Windows installation and drivers inside locked zip files is beyond me.

Did you miss the multi-player solitaire bit? There's plenty of multi-player card games they could have used, solitaire isn't one of them. The clue is in the name.