White Hat Hacking in Vancouver WA

Sometimes I’m called upon to do some obviously bad things for a good cause, like, break into a computer system.

Well, yeah, that sounds bad, but the PC was actually owned by a recently-deceased family member of a client. They didn’t know the password and they needed in.

This is called white hat hacking. It’s white hat because I’m using a hacking technique for what might be perceived as a “good” service.  I’m doing this family a service by getting access to an otherwise restricted resource.

You might be familiar with this term. White Hat refers to a “good guy” from the old westerns. Black Hat refers to the “bad guys” who always wore the black hat.  Good, bad; hero, villain. You get the idea.

But the truth is this can happen to small businesses, too. Somebody decides to password-protect a company asset and they need in. Maybe its a termination issue or a policy violation, or somebody just locked themselves out. Happens all of the time.

In this case, I was using an old tool from my toolkit. It allowed me to boot the laptop up on a CD, load up a small operating system, reach in to the registry of Windows, and reset the passwords of all of the user accounts. Bingo, bango, bongo: we were done in five minutes. Sometimes it’s the little tricks up my sleeve that lets me bring extra value to my clients.

 

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