Hack Windows Screen Saver Password

This is an interesting hack and not many people know about it.This requires no canned hacking tool, we will crack the password manually!!! First of all, why do we need to crack the Windows Screen Saver? How does it restrict us? If a Screen Saver is password protected, then whenever it is turned on, then in order to turn it off, you need to enter a password.It does not allow us to do anything on a system until and unless we enter the password. We will keep seeing the screen saver until we authenticate ourselves by entering the password.No not even CTRL+ALT+DEL works in this case. Windows stores the Screen Saver password in the user.dat file in the Windows directory.


If you have multiple profiles on your system then it is stored in the user.dat file in the c:\windows\profiles\username directory.(On Win 3x systems it is stored in the control.ini file The user.dat file constitues the registry of the Windows system, thus we can say that the Windows Screen Saver Password is stored in the registry.First of all, you need to change the attributes of this file and make it editable by right clicking on it and unselecting the Read Only Option else you will not be able to edit it.Once this is done, open this file in WordPad (Any text editor will do except MS WORD And Notepad.)Now look for the string: ScreenSave_Data You will find an even number of characters after Data, this is the Screen Saver Password encrypted and stored in the hex system.Each pair or hex values represent a single ASCII plaintext character.This means that if there are 10 hex values then the password is of 5 characters, each pair of Hex values standing for a single plaintext ASCII character.So in order to get the Plaintext password you just need to decrypt these hex values into ASCII.