Renaming Built-In Accounts for Better Security
Windows
7 comes with a built-in Administrator account. This account is
all-powerful on Windows, so the last thing you want is for some
malicious user to gain control of the system with administrator access.
This is why Windows 7 systems come with the Administrator account
disabled by default. However, earlier in this book, I showed you how to
activate the Administrator account in Windows 7.
Windows 7 also comes with a
built-in account called Guest, which you can enable to give people
temporary access to your computer, as described in the next section.
(The Guest account is disabled by default in Windows 7.)
If the Administrator and
Guest accounts are disabled, you have no worries about these accounts.
However, if the accounts are enabled, black-hat hackers have one foot in
your digital door already because they know the names of two accounts:
Administrator and Guest. Now all they have to do is guess the password
associated with one of these accounts. If you’ve protected the
Administrator and Guest accounts with strong passwords, you almost
certainly have nothing to fret about here.
However, you can
close the door completely on malicious intruders by taking away the one
piece of information they know: the name of each account. By changing
the account names from Administrator and Guest to new names that are
completely unobvious, you add an extra layer of security to your Windows
system.
Here are the steps to follow to change the names of these accounts:
1. | Select Start, type lusrmgr.msc, and then press Enter. The Local Users and Groups snap-in appears.
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2. | Right-click the Administrator account, and then click Rename.
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3. | Type the new account name, and then press Enter.
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4. | Right-click the Guest account, and then click Rename.
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5. | Type the new account name, and then press Enter. |
