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Lockout policy for Administrator account

The Administrator account is an exposed user account; hackers want to know this account's

password. Unfortunately, the Windows 2000 operating system makes it easy for hackers to get

passwords.



Administrators can define a special lockout policy for user accounts. If hackers try to guess the

password, the operating system will lock the account for a certain period of time after the defined

number of unsuccessful logons. For instance, the operating system can lock out an account for 30

minutes after three unsuccessful logons. This protects user accounts from password guessing

attacks.



This lockout policy has no effect on Administrator accounts. This means that hackers can try

unlimited passwords on the Administrator account, and the account will never be locked.



There is a partial solution to this problem. Microsoft has shipped a utility called admnlock that can

enable the lockout of the Administrator account from the network. Here's the code you'd use:



Just run the utility with /e switch:|

"admnlock /e"



Unfortunately, Microsoft has discontinued admnlock. If you're running Windows 2000 SP2 or later,

you can achieve the same function by using passprop /adminlockout from the Windows NT 4

Resource Kit.

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