I am a bit of security expert myself!
pulls out screwdriver
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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In the past they had jumpers for the same purpose.
IBM ThinkPads could be reset if you beamed a certain radio frequency directly at the BIOS chip. It was documented in the user guide as a feature if you were ever locked out, or the system was no longer booting. It's been 20 years but I doubt that feature ever went away.
yeah, I did that in my high school years.(80386~80486 years). The jumper reset is neat cause you can then set the school computer to boot from floppy first instead of booting from whatever source it was set to.
So, how tf you have access to MB? Well, if you are much better at computers than most teachers at school, naturally they let you "help" doing the maintenance(aka, figure out what's wrong, replace parts etc). I did those free labour so I can play some games during school hours, so that's a fair trade.
It's even more trivial to remove the hard drive and read/write it directly, possibly even booting it on a separate system directly or in a virtual machine. BIOS passwords (on all x86 systems, not just Lenovo) provide very limited security benefits, but they can be sufficient for some basic security requirements.