PASSWORDS

[Guest]

I hate people touching my computer so I put a password on the one and only
user account, mine. However my mate stayed in the computer room last night
and when I woke up this morning he listed the name of the first and last
files in "My Shared Documents" I dont have guest enabled on the computer so I
would like to know 1. How he got in because theres no way he guessed the
password and 2. How can i stop him getting in again?

please help

clitlicker46

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP\)]

There could be all kinds of ways he might have done this but given that he
was trying to show you that you could not stop him from entering your user
account and it appears he knows you wish to stop such access, the most
logical way for him to have done this would be to have installed a keylogger
program on your system.

Most firewalls won't detect a keylogger but they will detect if a keylogger
is trying to send information to whomever installed the keylogger. If you
have a firewall installed, check the logs for suspicious activity. If you
don't see any it may only mean the firewall has cleaned the logs for that
period so now you should be checking the firewall logs daily for any such
activity.

You may find more information about key loggers and how to determine if one
is installed on your system by doing a search on keyloggers on Google.

Also, there is a hidden administrator account in XP and it is called
"Administrator." Most users don't assign a password for this account, many
don't even know it exists. If your mate knows about, he could log on to
that account and while he couldn't open your files, he might have been able
to see first and last files in the folder you specified. After all, they
were in "My Shared Documents" which tells the system these docs can be
shared.

 

[Guest]

Its not the keylogger thats for sure however when I spoke to him he mentioned
something about that Administrator account, but when I reset my computer I
only had my account to select from and could not find any Administrator
account, so how do you access the Administrator account?

Also the My Shared Documents folder is located in My Documents which I told
XP to hide from all other users.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP\)]

If you have XP Pro, hit ctrl-alt-delete at the welcome screen, select the
administrator account from the dropdown list or, if not listed, type
administrator in the user ID box, leave the password blank and press enter.
Then, if you wish to set a password for this account, go to Control Panel,
open User Accounts, click "Change an Account," select the account named
administrator, click "Change my password," and follow the prompts. Be sure
to create a password reset disk by clicking "Prevent a forgotten password"
and following the instructions.

If you have XP Home Edition, boot the system, start tapping F8 and continue
to do so until the menu appears, select Safe Mode, press enter, at Safe
Mode, choose the account named administrator, leave the password blank,
press enter, decline the option to go to System Restore and then follow the
above instructions.

If he doesn't know the password for this hidden account, this should prevent
him from logging in using this account unless he somehow discovers the
password. I'd hide the password reset disk from him and not even tell him
you made one.