From: abort@yabbs
To: all@yabbs
Subject: re: PW cracker
Date: Sun Jan 23 00:20:00 1994
WEll Fastjack, I dont think cosmos was talking about grabbing the actual 
passwd to the root acount from the unshadoewd pword file.  He meant 
hacking it out once in the system.  I assume that he meant once your in 
there is usually a way to get root.  Like playing with suid programs, and 
general mayhem you can get done with any account really.  Once you get an 
account, unless the system is really high security you can probably get 
root if you know what your doing.
 
    ALSO, someone stated that a "x" or "*" means that it is an invalid 
account.  That's not really true.  As I have seen "*" used to mark a 
shadowed passwd file.  It's used as a marker.  I have also seen and heard 
of something like "x" bieng used to fill a place in the passwd field of a 
invalid account.  Like they do it to uucp and other normally default 
accounts.  This renders it impossbile to login to that account, but they 
need to be there for certain system operations.