Physical attacks at the console
In this section, we will explore different types of attacks that attackers typically perform on a system with physical access.
Samdump2 and chntpw
One of the most preferred ways to dump password hashes is to utilize samdump2
. This can be achieved by turning on the power of the system acquired and then booting it through our Kali USB stick by making the required changes in the BIOS.
Once the system is booted through Kali, by default the local hard drive must be mounted as a media drive, as shown in the following screenshot:

If the drive is not able to mount, the attackers would follow the upcoming steps to mount the drive by running the following commands:
mkdir /mnt/target1mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/target1
Once the system is mounted, navigate to the following mounted folder, in our case, it is/media/root/<ID>/Windows/System32/Config
, and run samdump2 SYSTEM SAM
as shown in the following screenshot. The SYSTEM
and SAM
files should display all the users on the system...