Gadgetory

oh ah yeah I'm trying out this thumb drive that claims to let you unlock any windows-based PC in just a couple minutes though tax geforce ten series cards feature invidious Pascal architecture as well as other features like their ice storm cooling and spectral lighting system check them out at the link in the video description as my hair whatever okay so silliness aside this little thing right here is the password reset key to the follow-up to the original password reset key that was kick-started by jaunty Lavelle back in 2014 raising about 34,000 great britain pounds now they send me the original one for consideration for one of my handy tech under a hundred episodes about four months ago but i ended up rejecting it due to its strange behavior in windows 10 particularly around windows live accounts versus local accounts however it turns out they were already in the process of working on a follow-up that's the one they've sent me and that's the one that we'll be checking out today so with the password reset key - they've dramatically improved the UI they've added windows 10 support they've added Windows Live account detection though to be clear password reset key cannot break through the password of a Windows Live account and will simply redirect you to microsoft's account recovery page and they've added BitLocker encrypted volume detection though again it just prompts you to enter your password or backup key if you want to access any of those files they haven't broken BitLocker encryption that would be pretty big news so then what does it do well in the time you've spent listening to me explain the limitations you've pretty much witnessed the basic functionality I stripped the password off of a computer that was just using a local windows account but there's more so by inserting the password reset key into any Windows PC and changing the boot mode to legacy instead of UEFI that's an important step please note you will also have to disable some security features like secure boot for example and then changing your boot device to the PRK you'll get dropped into this menu which allows you to do a bunch of things really you can clone a local account which allows you to then strip the password off of that cloned account this is useful if you're a tech trying to get into a PC and you don't want the customer to have to reset their password after the fact you can open up a registry editor you can make changes to the PC using the command prompt you can recover files from it either directly through a File Explorer and then you can just copy to or move to some other attached storage device or you can actually recover deleted files from it and finally and this one's kind of scary if you didn't know how easy it was to break into a Windows PC you can take the local administrator account which is on every Windows 10 computer and you can unlock and activate it which means as soon as you reboot pull out the PRK go back into UEFI mode if applicable you will be landed on the windows login screen you'll be able to log into that account with no password required from there you'll be able to do anything you want to the computer including deleting the existing Windows Live account keeping all of that person's files and even setting up new accounts using it as though it had never belonged to anyone else so if you're a well-intentioned technician out there you're probably looking at this going well gee that looks great that could make my life a lot more useful thanks for that Linus but if you're a general consumer who had no idea that you could break into a Windows computer in a couple of minutes with a $20.00 doodad that you can buy online I can see how this would be a little scary and what I'm about to say probably won't make you feel much better this is not the only way to break into a Windows computer it's actually quite easy this just makes it accessible enough that anyone can do it even with no dinking around in the registry or the command prompt so the next question people are bound to ask is how do I protect myself against this because even if you did put a password on that built-in administrator account well I can strip it off in seconds and the answer is there are a few ways so full disk encryption using BitLocker within Windows is one of those ways it can detect the volume but it can't read any of the files off of it and you can also buy SSDs or hard drives that feature self encryption so you have to enter a password right when you turn on the computer in the first place in order to unlock the encryption on that drive if your computer doesn't have a trusted platform module or you're trying to keep your files safe without going and buying a new drive though there are other options there too so luke has a video which you can check out over here on programs that you can stall within windows to create encrypted containers for your files that even if someone used a PRK rip that file off the computer they would need the key in order to open so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video go ahead and hit that dislike button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe even consider checking out the password reset key that's the product we feature today at the link to Amazon in the video description you will get a kickback if you buy one using our link also in the video description is our merch store where you can buy cool t-shirts just like this one as well as our community forum which you can join to discuss this video or really anything else tech I think that pretty much wraps it up don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and don't forget to check out our other channels like channel super fun super fun over there by the time you watch this video we could have this like super weird video of me like playing a Japanese mobile game it's like bizarre but you might actually enjoy it just don't admit to anyone you know that you enjoyed it see you next time