Cisco Cisco IPS 4255 Sensor

For most IPS platforms, you can now recover the password on the sensor rather than using the service 
account or reimaging the sensor. This section describes how to recover the password for the various IPS 
platforms. It contains the following topics:

Password recovery implementations vary according to IPS platform requirements. Password recovery is 
implemented only for the cisco administrative account and is enabled by default. The IPS administrator 
can then recover user passwords for other accounts using the CLI. The cisco user password reverts to 
cisco and must be changed after the next login.

Administrators may need to disable the password recovery feature for security reasons. 

 lists the password recovery methods according to platform.

For more information on when and how to disable password recovery, see 

.

4200 series sensors

Standalone IPS appliances

GRUB prompt or ROMMON

AIP SSM
AIP SSC-5

ASA 5500 series adaptive security 
appliance modules

Adaptive security appliance CLI 
command

IDSM2

Switch IPS module

Password recovery image file

AIM IPS
NME IPS

Router IPS modules

Bootloader command