hacking root

[shadowrider]

I just heard from a friend. at work, they're using redhat 6 and had a problem with all the accounts were deleted.
even they couldn't even logged in using the root. Now, what they did was, the booted with bootdisk, launched a bash screen, created a user named "root". So apparently there were 2 accounts with the name "root" which one of them was just a mere regular user. Now, he mentioned something about modifying /etc/passwd and setting userID,group to 0, and there you have it! the "used to be" a regular root, now have become a "super user" root.
any details on doing this exactly?

EDIT

oh sorry...I was wrong.
the root account was deleted also. so i guess this was a way of creating the root account back. but i'd still like to know more details on how to do it though.

[Icarus]

This has been discussed a hundred times here :)

You can make any user have super-user privlages like root. Change their SID to 0, boom...your root

Anyone can also logon to a machine localy and change settings, users and passwords. As long as they can get to it, they can change it.

I hate to lock this, but there have been so many threads lately about 'hacking' I can't stand to see another like this go bad...