Hacking at work for fun and a paycheck

July 16, 2007 – 8:00 pm

So at the new job we have a few offices in different locations of country.  For example, next week I’m heading to Tennessee to experience the call center application I’m working on first hand.   I had just relocated one of our databases from the Michigan office to our sql server here in Minnesota and a report that a user from Michigan runs broke in the process.  The user called in to report the report had to be run but she wasn’t at her system.  I was told that remote desktop was disabled on these systems but the passwords I was given weren’t working properly.

After some failed attempts at remotely starting remote desktop, I started looking into ways to get into VNC.  They weren’t running the older vulnerable version of so that was out of the question.  After doing a bit of google searching I came across a utility called vncpwdump which allows you to dump the existing password from the registry.  Unfortunately the program was only giving me a portion of the password.  Instead I decided I was approaching this the wrong way.   I went ahead and changed my VNC password to a temporary password and then exported the registry key.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\RealVNC\WinVNC4]
“Password”=hex:aa,aa,aa,aa,aa,aa,aa,aa
“SecurityTypes”=”VncAuth”
“ReverseSecurityTypes”=”None”
“QueryConnect”=dword:00000000
“dummy”=”"

Then using Connect Network Registry option in the registry editor, I imported my registry file to the remote system.  Voila!  

  1. One Response to “Hacking at work for fun and a paycheck”

  2. Mortal Kombat voice: “impressive.”

    By Brandon on Jul 19, 2007

Post a Comment