Does the Ophcrack LiveCD require hash collection via programs like pwdump?

Question

When I used the Ophcrack LiveCD recently, the program automatically ran without me manually loading any hashes. Question is: If Ophcrack does not automatically find hashes, how can I go about obtaining them for a Windows 7 computer for which I do not have administrator access (which is required for pwdump7).

Answer 1

Typically if you don’t have a user with admin rights you need to escalate privileges (i.e. exploit a vulnerability), then fire up the pw dump tools.

copied from Ophcrack wiki verbatim:

"You can either enter the hash manually (Single hash option), import a text file containing hashes you created with pwdump, fgdump or similar third party tools (PWDUMP file option), extract the hashes from the SYSTEM and SAM files (Encrypted SAM option), dump the SAM from the computer ophcrack is running on (Local SAM option) or dump the SAM from a remote computer (Remote SAM option).

For the Encrypted SAM option, the SAM is located under the Windows system32/config directory and can only be accessed for a Windows partition that is NOT running. For the Local SAM and Remote SAM options, you MUST logged in with the administrator rights on the computer you want to dump the SAM."