Originally published at: Fix: Remove Start Up Password in Windows 7/8 and 10
In the last few months, a number of users have reportedly received calls from scammers impersonating Microsoft or other big names in the IT industry. These scammers call the users by looking up their names on the internet, and spin a story about their computers supposedly sending out viruses, being hacked, or presenting other issues…
Indian scammer called by 83yr old father pretending to be BT after he had reported a broadband speed issue. Obviously inside job… Scammer got remote access via Supremo and set syskey password. 123456 plus syskey removal instructions above works well. Thanks to all.
Try 1111 or 0000 or 1234 or 123456 for the password. One of these just came in to helpdesk and I tried 123456 and BINGO!
It shows the partitions then spits out a few lines about SCSI and gets stuck.
Just had this happen to someone I know, and was asked to help fix. Tried guessing the password but that didn’t work out. The method above seemed to work fine until the end, gave me an error saying the partition failed to unmount properly as I tried to exit.
My solution was I found a product that pretty much used brute force using commonly used syskey passwords by scammers (among other things). About 10-15 minutes after it started, it found it! The password in this case ended up being a measly “mike123”…smh.
I was able to log in, change the syskey encryption back to being system generated as you mentioned. All files still present. Ran a few malware scans and that computer was back in business. Of course I had to educate the user so something like this hopefully wont happen again.
In that case, only option is to do a clean install or guess the usual passwords they use. You’ll have to do a Google Search on it.
The scam team from India have now deleted all registry backups. So it is not going to work anymore.
cool.
I’m having the same problem with an infinite reboot. I performed all of the steps shown on a Windows 10 computer and now it reboots twice before giving me an “automatic repair” and a message that my PC did not start correctly. Do you have any advice for how I can repair the boot on this computer? I don’t get any other error messages.
Ok, after 3 tries I was able to perform the steps shown. Not sure what happened, but thanks for your help.
Unfortunately now the PC continually reboots with no prompt for a password.
Good suggestion.
Try 123 as the password. When it happened to me it was 1234, try passwords like that.
I’ve updated the article. Please check.
This worked but please add after pressing Y I had to press Q then takes me to step
4 and it ask if I want to write back and when I press yes I finally got it to work. Before I was restarting after your instructions to go back to bios.
After years since I fell for this scam, FINALLY a solution that worked! THANK YOU!!!
HI i somehow figured SYSKEY password but after that I saw RESTORE option on my computer instead of normal statup. How to get normal statup.
please also try followinowing other passwords 1234, 12345, 123456 as they are most commonly used by Scammers.
mine came up with 123456789 as the password. They seem to like simple numbers don’t they!
my client’s laptop locked up with syskey after a “Microsoft Support” phone call… I tried guessing the password and got it on the second guess. LMAO
123456
Hi Max,
I will update the guide. Thank you for pointing out. Do you have a better solution?