How to hack into a computer running anything from Mac OS X Puma to Snow Leopard.

DISCLAIMER:I take know responsibility for your actions, I am making an Instructable on ETHICAL hacking for the hacking contest. If you use this to gain access to a computer that you do not own without permission that is considered un-ethical hacking or more simply hacking and is a felony In the United States and most other countries. Follow at your own risk.

Edit: this has been featured on an Italian blog (I don't know why but I don't care) here.

So as much as I and fellow Mac users Would like to believe differently Mac OS X is actually quite easy to hack if you are at the machine itself. In this Instructable we are going to boot into single user mode (�(alt)+s at startup) and delete a file that the computer checks for at startup that tells it that it has been setup. If you follow this Instructable word for word than no harm should befall the target computer. I do not yet know if this works on Lion because I do not yet have Lion.

PLEASE READ THIS WORD FOR WORD BEFORE DOING ANYTHING .

Step 1 Resources

So there is no way that I  would have gone in to single user mode and randomly pressed a bunch of keys until I had a new admin account by myself, so I would like to thank this tutorial and the comments in it. It is actually not the one that I learned from and it is a bit outdated, but I can not find the tutorial where I originally learned to do this.

Comments

[anonymouse197]

Lion? What do you think?

[ElvenChild]

You know what I really do not know seeing as to how I have not upgraded yet (I have a lot of software that runs under rossetta which they took out of lion) however I did find this which might be worth a try.

[anonymouse197]

That looks pretty good to me, but there is a much easier version. Because lion has no install CD, the password is reset by booting into recovery mode, going into terminal, and typing "resetpassword". It couldn't be much easier!