Injecting a user account into mySQL

Question

Tackling a strange scenario here.

We use a proprietary workstation management application which uses mySQL to store its data. Within the application they provide number of reports, such as which user logged into which machine at what time, all the software products installed on the monitored machines, so on and so forth. We are looking to do a different set of reports, however, they do not support custom reports.

Since their data is being stored in mySQL, I gather I can do the reporting manually. I don't have valid credentials to connect to the mySQL server though. Is there anyway for me to create a user account in the mySQL server? I do not want to reset the root password or anything account that might be in there, as it might break the application.

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I have full access to the Windows 2003 server. I can stop and restart services, including the mySQL server. To the actual mySQL server, I only have basic access through the GUI provided by the software. I can't connect to it directly through CLI or through another tool (due to the lack of credentials).

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I apologize if it came off as if I'm trying to get unauthorized access to the mySQL server. I have contacted the software company, and as of today it's been two weeks without a response from them. I need to get to the data. I have full access to the physical box, I have admin privileges on it.

Answer 1

You'll want to use the MySQL password recovery process. Follow these instructions, except replace the password reset query with a query to add a new user. The new user query would be something like:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'myuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword' WITH GRANT OPTION;

That will create a new user "myuser" with the password "mypassword", who may log in to MySQL through the local system's CLI. You can then use the MySQL Administrator GUI (download here) and update user permissions so you can log in from other systems on the network. Or use the GRANT statement from the CLI, if that's more your style.