Windows 7 : Setting Up User Security - Hiding Usernames in the Logon Screen

Hiding Usernames in the Logon Screen

When you start most Windows PCs, you end up at the logon screen so that you can choose your username and log on by entering your password. In Windows 7, the logon screen always displays icons for each user account, and each icon shows the name of the account. Figure 3 shows a typical Windows 7 logon screen.

Figure 3. The Windows 7 logon screen shows the names of the computer’s user accounts.

This may not seem all that important, but that logon screen is actually helping any would-be cracker a great deal. Why? The nefarious nogoodnik now has an important advantage because he knows the names of all your user accounts (or, in the case of XP Pro, one of your accounts). Yes, the evildoer must still guess an account’s password, but you can make things a heckuva lot harder by forcing the snoop to also guess a username on your system. How do you do that? By tweaking Windows so that it doesn’t display usernames in the logon screen. Sneaky!

You do that by following these steps:

If you don’t have access to the Local Security Policy snap-in, open the Registry Editor and create (if it’s not there already) a DWORD setting named DontDisplayLastUserName with the value 1 in the following key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

The next time you start your computer, no usernames appear in the logon screen. Figure 4 shows the Windows 7 logon screen without usernames.

Figure 4. With the Do Not Display Last User Name policy enabled, the logon screen no longer shows the names of the computer’s user accounts.