How to Protect Personal Computer from hackers.

How Hacker will Attack you PC?

Physical access to your PC.

If  hacker have physical access to your pc than without knowing your password he can access your  personal computer (PC).  It is very easy to access any windows PC’s. How they  break your password is simple all they use are some tools which run Brute Force attack. In this attack they try all the possible passwords and if they are lucky than they will have your secret password. They don’t do it manually but uses some software’s which are freely available on internet.

Understand the working of  your PC.

When you switch on PC it start loading your operating system (OS). There is a section on hard disk known as boot loader where address  your OS is saved after that your OS is loaded to memory (RAM ) and other processes in OS started after loading. Now you will see a screen with your user name when you enter your password here windows check it with the password stored in your system. This password is stored at following location.


SAM (Security Account Manager) file. In this file your data is stored in Hexadecimal format which is called hashes which mean your password is converted into a hash value or we can say that it is encrypted but here we can not decrypt it because it is a hash value. What your OS does is when you enter password it convert that into a hash value and compare it with hash value stored in SAM File.

Windows 7 L ogin Screen

What hackers Do?

They run a software to try all the possible passwords. If your password is weak(simple string of alphabets like “andhfhfka” or “adfjjdf” ) than they will crack it very quickly.

Which software’s they use for attacking  your system. Here are few names.

  • OPH Crack
  • Kon Boot
  • Offline Pwasspowd Cracker
  • Hiren Multi Boot Disk.

What is Solution

Use strong password it means your password should contain lower case, upper case at least one number, one special character (@#&*!)  and should be at least 8 character long  for example “pAssworD*8”  this will make any software too difficult to try brute force  attack on your system. Don’t allow people access your system whom you don’t know.

Back Door Entry into your System.

This attack is only possible when some one had access to your PC before and he modified some settings in your system and created a back door like using syskey feature of windows (pressing shift key 5 times).