Security Basics mailing list archives

Re: Locked out local admin accounts...


From: Miles Stevenson <miles () mstevenson org>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:01:45 -0400

On Wednesday 11 August 2004 06:21 pm, Ryan Murphy wrote:
In our environment today, local administrator accounts on workstations and
servers have been getting locked out at an alarming rate. Nothing crazy is
standing out on the IDS, and the security logs on the machines that are
having the administrator account locked out aren't showing any login
attempts. What could be going on here? We're a Win2000 environment, and
domain accounts seem to be unaffected, it's only the local administrator
accounts that are getting locked.


Are you sure that you are auditing failed login attempts? Any other strange 
behavior other than the accounts being locked out? What does perfmon tell 
you? Are the systems under heavier load than usual?

Also, how large are the timestamp gaps in your event logs? Is there anything 
to indicate that event logs are being deleted? Do you have any applications 
that you use which login into each system remotely using that account? Also, 
were you using the same password for each machine?

-- 
Miles Stevenson
miles () mstevenson org
PGP FP: 035F 7D40 44A9 28FA 7453 BDF4 329F 889D 767D 2F63

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethical Hacking at the InfoSec Institute. Mention this ad and get $545 off 
any course! All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 10 students or less 
to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors. 
Attend a course taught by an expert instructor with years of in-the-field 
pen testing experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Master the skills 
of an Ethical Hacker to better assess the security of your organization. 
Visit us at: 
http://www.infosecinstitute.com/courses/ethical_hacking_training.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Current thread: