Monday, May 9, 2016

sudo - I'm locked out of my main account, its suddenly become unreadable, and the super user password is no longer working

I'm locked out of my main account, its suddenly become unreadable, and the super user password is no longer working. I have a few other users on the machine, so I can get in there, but can't do anything because the root password has changed. I can't even read my main users home directory. I don't know if this is connected, but suddenly my installed PPAs had lost their GPG keys and I kept getting errors about that when I ran apt-get update. Well not all of them, but a lot of them.


Is there anything I can do like boot up from a pentesting distro like tails and see whats going on? Only my home directory is encrypted. I have loads of unbacked up data on my machine, I can't just reinstall the OS now. I'm in trouble if I can't fix this. I don't know what to do, I've never experienced anything like this before, and I used to have an external harddrive so I would just reinstall if this happened but I can't do that in this case.


I'm booting up with a live CD right now, I read that you can just edit the /etc/shadow and erase the root users password. I'm hoping this still works. I'm in the /etc/shadow file now and I see the root user has a ! as its password. I read that if I delete that, then no more root password. That still doesn't solve the problem of my encrypted home directory being in accessible. Can I change my users password by making a new hash and replacing it with the hash in the shadow file?


UPDATE: I edited the shadow file and was able to set a new root password. But then I couldn't seem to use the root passowrd. Theres also a /etc/shadow- file, and the root user is assigned a number for a password there.


Only my main user has been locked down, the file permissions of my home directly somehow changed to dr-x-----. I'm still the owner of the directory. I can sudo into the home directory but its encrypted. chkrootkit says that tcpd is infected, but nothing other than that.


Lynus gave me 3 warnings that were minor.

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