Got connected with wrong password

I got signed in as SYS at the command prompt level where i was asked of my password, amazingly, when i mistakenly keyed in the wrong password i got connected into the sys schema.

What could be the possible cause and how can i get around it.

[b]Question asked by visitor Obed[/b]

No way you can login with wrong password .

Try this
1. Members of the dba group (or the ORA_DBA group on Windows) are allowed to log on as a SYS without supplying a password at all. Connect / as sysdba means "get me on as sys, but I'm not telling you my password" -at which point Oracle checks who you're logged on to at the OS level, and then checks the group memberships of the dba (Linux/Unix) or ORA_DBA groups (Windows). If you're a member you're in... and then you can issue a command such as 'alter user sys identified by newpwd'.

You can only really do this technique, however, when you're connecting on the box which runs Oracle itself. If you don't have access to the server, it's not going to work. You also need to configure those OS groups with the appropriate tools. If you don't know how to do that, you're in trouble.

2. If you're using a password file to authenticate as SYS, then you can simply delete the existing password file and replace it with a new one... and you get to specify the new password for SYS at the time you create the new file. The utility provided by Oracle for this purpose is "orapwd" and the command on Windows, for example, would look like:

orapwd file=c:\oracle\10g\databases\pwdSID.ora password=newpwd entries=20

The file has to live in the ORACLE_HOME\database or ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory; it has to be called whatever is appropriate for your operating system (now you see why it helps to know your OS!) and the figure for "entries" represents how many people you might want to grant the SYSDBA privilege to in the future, so make it higher than you think you need right now.

On Linux, the required name for the password file is of the form orapwSID, where SID is the name of your instance/database. On Windows, it's as I showed you above: pwdSID.ora.

Once you have a new password file in place, you can log in as 'sys\newpword@somedb as sysdba' and again issue an 'alter user sys identified by yetanothernewpword' command: that will update the password file as well as changing things inside the database itself and you'll log on with that password thereafter.