The lamest hacks
A little while back, a colleague of a colleague approached me with a favour request that was hard to refuse (no, not that kind...) They had one of these external harddrives that supports on-drive encryption and, as you will have guessed, had forgotten the password. No more saved business docs, but also no more saved baby pics. "Could we have a look?", they asked. A brief search online revealed companies who claim to be able to recover passwords for these very drives, but required shipping the drive from South Africa to Europe, and the cost was not instantly dismissible. Surely there was another way? Automating password entry was easy enough; when powered on, the drive's password entry dialog popped up and it was simple to drive the GUI and enter passwords. However, the slight hiccup was that, after five password guesses, the drive needed to be powercycled to reset the guess counter. One of my many failings is a distinct lack of basic electronic experience, and even being...