Unknown "admin" user automatically trying to log-on.

[maggieburr]

Hello everyone!

I am new to using sevenforums for posting things. I have tried to read all of the rules, but if I did not do something correctly please let me know so I can fix it and ensure it doesn't happen again.

I work in an IT department on a college campus and have a specific issue that no one in my office has ever seen/heard of before.

We have a faculty member who just recently received a new desktop computer (within the last month). It is a Dell Optiplex 9010 running Windows 7 Pro x64. All of the computers we manage have a standard user account (ie: John Doe) with their password and an administrator account that we have the log-in information for. Both accounts are set as administrators and have no restrictions whatsoever. We do not run a network or anything, so they are both on the actual PC.

Yesterday I was called down to her office with an issue of her not being able to log on. After much inspection I discovered that upon start up the computer was trying to log in to an account named "admin" automatically and the two user accounts that we manage were nowhere in sight. I was able to select the "other user" option and manually enter the log in credentials for both users and successfully log on.

I had never seen this "admin" account before and am confident that it was not created by a user of the PC. I decided to view the accounts via "manage accounts" and it is nowhere in sight. I looked on the C drive and also did not see it anywhere. Also the accounts that have previously been used on the computer were still there as if nothing had changed.

We use Webroot antivirus and I completed a scan on that, which showed up clean.

Any advice, suggestions, etc would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

-MB

*Edit*
I forgot to mention that I booted up in safe mode and the problem still remained.

 

[Dom]

Hi there, welcome to Seven Forums
It seems the Administrator account has been activated within Windows 7.
Follow the link to a tutorial below to disable the 'admin' account:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/507-built-administrator-account-enable-disable.html

As you have not set any restrictions, it is most likely a user of the PC in question has activated this account beforehand and has thrown you off as you have never seen it before Just follow the tutorial to disable it and tell us if the PC tries to login automatically onto another account. Good luck!

Dom

EDIT: If you are to use the command prompt method please bear in mind what is said:
"NOTE: If you had previously renamed the built-in "Administrator" account's name, then you will need to substitute administrator in the command below with the new name instead."
So that 'new name' may be 'admin'. If the account is still there just try and use the default name 'administrator'.

 

[maggieburr]

I checked that and it was still disabled. Sorry I forgot to include that in my original post.

 

[pricetech]

The net user command, without any switches, will show you what accounts are on the computer. Meanwhile the mmc command will get you an empty console where you should be able to load any plugins you need, such as Computer Management.

Run both as Administrator, of course.