John is a keen administrator, and has followed all of the best practices as he could find on securing his Windows Server. He has renamed the Administrator account to a new name that he is sure cannot be easily guessed. However, there are people who already attempt to compromise his newly renamed administrator account.
How is it possible for a remote attacker to decipher the name of the administrator account if it has been renamed?
- The attacker used the user2sid program.
- The attacker used the sid2user program.
- The attacker used nmap with the –V switch.
- The attacker guessed the new name.
Answer(s): B
Explanation:
User2sid.exe can retrieve a SID from the SAM (Security Accounts Manager) from the local or a remote machine Sid2user.exe can then be used to retrieve the names of all the user accounts and more. These utilities do not exploit a bug but call the functions LookupAccountName and LookupAccountSid respectively. What is more these can be called against a remote machine without providing logon credentials save those needed for a null session connection.