Simple Security Tips #1: Administrator Account

Over the past ten years, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects for the United States military, intelligence/security agencies, and the financial industry. As such, my priorities when it comes to Information Technology, from desktop support to server and network administration, has always been and will always be: Security, Availability, and Usability, in that order.

With this is mind I wanted to start a small series of blogs that can help people understand that there are some very simple things that they can do to exponentially increase the security of their personal and business machines.

The system’s administrator account on your Windows 7 PC.

Your system’s administrator account is lord and master over your machine. It can access any file, change any setting, and has the potential to do some very very bad things. Not only that, but it can do all this without you even knowing it’s doing anything. So, knowing this leads me to my first tip which is easily the most important security tip I can ever give:

1. Do not use the administrator account as your normal user account.
The administrator account should never be used for internet browsing, email checking, or any other day-to-day tasks. By default, the first account you create when you set up a new Windows 7 machine is going to be a system administrator. Which means, unless you’ve created another account on your machine to use instead of that first account, you are currently running as the administrator. When you browse the internet, open email attachments, or even leave your administrator account logged into your machine you are opening your machine to viruses, malware, and intrusion. Viruses love your administrator account because they can install themselves, using the account you are logged in as, without you ever even knowing. Hackers love your administrator account because they can plant trojans which will allow them to access everything on your machine. So, I can not state it enough… the administrator account should only be used for administrating.

Fortunately, Windows 7 makes it very easy to create a new account and has a nice feature where, if you are logged in as a standard user but you need administrator privileges to do something, a pop-up will appear asking for the administrator password. This means that if anything ever tries to install itself, or make any changes to your computer, you will have to give it permission by entering your administrator password first. This drastically reduces the chance of unwanted malware being installed on your machine.

To create a separate, standard user account:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Under “User Accounts and Family Safety” click “Add or remove user accounts”
3. Click “Create a new account”
4. Create the new account as “Standard User”
5. *Recommended* Create a password for the new user by clicking on the user and clicking “Create a password”

Alternatively, if you’ve already been using your account for a while and like the way you have everything setup, you can create a new user to act as the administrator and then downgrade your current account to a standard user.

To downgrade a user to a standard user account (Note: you must always have an administrator account, so another account must be made administrator before you can downgrade the last administrator account to a standard account)

1. Open Control Panel
2. Under “User Accounts and Family Safety” click “Add or remove user accounts”
3. Click on the user you would like to downgrade
4. Click “Change the account type”
5. Select “Standard user” and click the Change Account Type button
6. Log off, and then back on again.

Now that you are running as a standard user you have completely the most important step to running a secure machine.

2. Make sure your administrator account has a strong password.
This is a no-brainer. After going through the steps of separating your administrator account from standard account, it would be pretty pointless to have your administrator password be your last name, or even worse, have no password at all. Now, depending on what sensitive information you are storing on your machine, your password does not necessarily need to be a random string of letters, numbers and symbols 24 characters long, but there are things that you want to avoid. Think to yourself, if I were trying to guess the password to someone’s account (not saying that you ever would) what would I guess?

• Don’t use any variation of “password”. These are pretty much the first thing anyone guesses. Just replacing a character doesn’t cut it. P@ssword, Passw0rd, Password1, AdminPass… these are all pretty standard guesses.
• Don’t use names. Truth is, a good portion of the time, someone trying to access your administrator account knows you. They’re likely to guess your name, last name, spouse’s name, children’s names, pet’s names, etc…
• Don’t use whole words. Most hacking attempts trying to crack an administrator password use libraries. Essentially, they use software to dig through a list of common words or passwords. A password of “apple” will easily be cracked by a brute force attack.
• Do use something you can easily remember. You need to avoid having to write down your password. That sticky-note on your screen is pretty easy giveaway.
• Do mix it up. Common practices are to replace letters with numbers and symbols. These are catching on and are starting to be guessed by hackers, but if you’re creative enough it will be pretty unhackable. Think along the lines of “L3tM31n!” you’ve simply replaced the vowels with numbers. Also, think outside the box with things like keyboard patterns. “!Z0m@X9n” may look like impossible to remember gibberish but if you look closely it’s actually a pattern that moves around the keyboard.

To change any user’s password:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Under “User Accounts and Family Safety” click “Add or remove user accounts”
3. Click the Account whose password you want to change
4. Click “Change the password” or “Create a password”

You administrator account is the key to your machine. Treat it as such and make sure no one can access it that isn’t supposed to.

3. Make sure your administrator account name is NOT “administrator”
This is as true for desktops as it is for servers: a secure system never has an account named “administrator” (or if it does… it has no access rights). If someone is trying to access your computer and you are using “administrator” as your administrator account, then they’ve already won half of the battle. A user account is just like a password: if you mix it up, the intruder will have to guess what that is before they can even start guessing what the password is. If your administrator account is “TacoKing” the hacker can bang away on “administrator” all day if they wanted, they’ll never get in.Avoid all variations of “administrator” as well. “admin”, “admin1″, “user”, “user1″, etc… will all be guessed by the hacker.

Fortunately, as discussed earlier, Windows 7 does not use “administrator” bydefault anymore. (Edit: Actually, it does still have an “administrator” account but it is disabled by default.) The default administrator is whatever account name you chose when first setting up the machine. However, here’s how to change the account name of any user on the machine:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Under “User Accounts and Family Safety” click “Add or remove user accounts”
3. Click the Account whose name you want to change
4. Click “Change the account name”

There you have it. In 10 minutes or less you have done more to protect against viruses, malware, and hackers than any anti-virus on the market can provide you. (You should definitely have an anti-virus too… just make sure you’ve taken care of your administrator account first.)