It’s probably easier for someone to break into your laptop or home computer than it would be for them to get into your phone. If you have your iPhone or Android phone password protected, that device is far more secure from intrusion than your Windows PC is or even your Mac is, for that matter.

A few days ago I put up a post on this blog about how to get rid of this recent virus wreaking havoc on PC’s world-wide called the FBI MoneyPak virus. A friend of mine got hit with it so I took his laptop home with me and managed over the course of several hours to pry this nasty thing out of his computer. You can scroll down and read about how I finally managed to defeat the dreaded FBI MoneyPak virus by hacking into his PC, creating a new account and running system restore from the command line.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about how easy it would be for someone to break into my own home computer or my laptop. You don’t have to be as tech savvy as Edward Snowden to hack a PC. Hell, even I can do it and so can you. All you need is some free sofware loaded on a thumbdrive and a small amount of familiarity with the Command Line.

For that matter, if all you want to do is steal some files all you really need to do is boot into the PC with any Linux distribution like the ever popular
Ubuntu. Just download the live Ubuntu .iso file and burn it to a CD or a USB stick and use it to boot up the PC you want to hack. The moment you start the target PC start tapping the F8 key to get to the boot menu and use the Arrow key to get to “Boot from CD” or Boot from J Drive or wherever and hit Enter. Once Ubuntu boots up you should have access to every file on the PC. Go to the E: drive or wherever you have Ubuntu and make it half a window and start dragging files onto it. Pretty simple.

O.K. let’s say for some reason that didn’t work for you or instead of lifting a few pics or docs you need access to the whole Windows OS. The first thing to try is the Linux-based Trinity Rescue CD. Every self-respecting geek aught to have this free software on a thumb drive. With Trinity Rescue you can boot into any password protected PC, you can clean up the bugs that may have been giving you trouble booting from the hard drive. It’s an amazingly useful little tool that makes hacking a Windows computer a very simple thing to do. Depending on the situation you may need to use the Command Line to create a new Administrator account.

I’ve read that another easy way to hack a PC is to buy Kon-Boot for $15 and, supposedly, you won’t have to even mess with the command line.

I certainly don’t advocate hacking into other people’s computers without their permission but every now and then someone will forget a password, maleware may lock you or your family member out or other situations might arise where there is a legitimate reason to break into a PC. Hacking a PC is a pretty simple thing to do.