How To Reset Linux Root Password

Key Takeaways

hey guys hackersploit here back again with another video so i've been getting a lot of questions regarding how to reset a linux root password over the the last few months and also the last few years if i come to think of it and i haven't actually covered this i've usually replied to these emails directly so i thought why not you know make a video and cover this um so there are a few assumptions i'm going to make regarding the question number one you're running a vm number two your bootloader is unlocked number three you're running grub as you know it is the default that comes with distros like kali linux however this video is not exclusive to kali linux if you're running any linux distribution with the grub bootloader and the bootloader is not locked down in any way then this should work for you so if you've forgotten your root password it's very simple to reset it now in my case i've just randomized or selected a random password and set it as my root password here and now let's just assume i've forgotten it so i'm just going to shut down my system right and we'll just shut that down and i'm running virtualbox here and i'm just going to hit start now and i'm going to specify my boot options within grub so that's very simple i just click on advanced options and i want to click on my latest kernel now in my case i have tons of kernels and that's because i've been upgrading my system regularly instead of downloading new vm images so i have the latest kernel which is 5.6.0 and that is the cali can also to specify the options here to actually customize the configuration we're going to just press the e key on your keyboard and we want to go all the way down to where the we have the the kernel selection and the kernel selection is uh is right over here you can see it references the vm linus file which is the actual kernel the kernel that's active and we want to go to the init options here in this case we have a few init options let me just go all the way to the end here so looks like we have some init scripts and we also have the splash screen that is brought up but the key thing here is the file system and the permission so we want to change this to a read and write we want to give it read and write permissions and then instead of initializing any anything like the splash screen we're just going to initialize the uh a shell session or in this case a bash session and what this is this is going to do is going to boot the linux kernel and then instead of starting up anything else it's just going to give us a bash or a terminal session and we're going to have read and write privileges so to boot this configuration up we just press f10 the key thing to take into consideration is this is not going to save this configuration so once you reboot your system grub will we will of course use the default configuration and not this configuration so to boot this we just hit f10 and that's going to put us that's going to give us a terminal session with root access or root privileges there we are so we get a terminal session with bash but we don't have any job control so that that's perfectly fine so all we need to do now is type in password and we specify the root user or any user for that matter and we hit enter and it's going to ask us to specify a new password i'm just going to enter my password here and there it's going to say password updated successfully and that's essentially it that's all you needed to do so i'm just going to reboot my system now reboot f and um we're just going to start that up now with the default options there we are and that should start up kali quite quickly so there we are that started up kali and specify the root user and the password that i just added there and you can see i'm able to log in successfully so that will work for any any use on the system and that's primarily because again we were able to specify the configuration with grub so uh like this again you know just shows you this is one of the security risks with on-premises servers and other linux workstations that don't have their bootloader lockdown it's very easy to to actually bypass you know any login and just reset the root password so that's something you want to keep into you want to keep in mind when securing your linux boxes or servers uh that being said that's all that i wanted to showcase if you have any questions regarding this video and any other thing you wanted to to point out make sure to post them in the comments section and i'll be seeing you in the next video peace