Password Recovery from stolen hard drive

[NoOp]

On 04/13/2010 10:23 AM, p.echols at comcast.net wrote:
> Last night my laptop was stolen.  Is it possible for an attacker,
> having possession of the hard drive, to determine my login password?

They don't need to, all they need to do is change it:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LostPassword

They can also use just about any liveCD & mount your partitions and of
course take any data they wish.

> How about stored in Thunderbird for email login?  Browser cache and /
> or firefox saved passwords?

Probably won't need to do that either if, like most, you've set up
Thunderbird so that you don't have to enter your password each time you
check your email *and* had not set a master password. Without setting a
master password your passwords are not encrypted (same applies to Firefox).

If you have set a master password, then the passwords are encrypted and
will take quite a bit of effort to crack.

There was a thread awhile back that recommended several methods to track
a stolen laptop, but I can't put my finger on it just now.