Examkin

Question

Difficulty: MediumWorkstation Hardening and Best Practices

An IT technician is preparing a standard workstation baseline image for remote customer support representatives. Company security policy requires hardening local user account settings to mitigate credential harvesting and unauthorized local access. Which of the following configuration steps should the technician perform to meet this security baseline requirement?

  1. Disable the built-in Guest account and rename the built-in local Administrator account.Answer
  2. B
    Assign the Guest account to the local Backup Operators group to restrict its system access.
  3. C
    Use the Services snap-in to change the startup type of the Windows Event Log service to Disabled.
  4. D
    Configure the Credential Manager Control Panel applet to automatically store network passwords without user authentication.

Answer

Disable the built-in Guest account and rename the built-in local Administrator account.
Hardening default local accounts requires disabling unneeded accounts like Guest and renaming well-known default accounts like Administrator. This eliminates easy entry points for unauthorized users and disrupts automated password brute-force scripts targeting standard account names.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify local account security risks
Default local accounts (such as Administrator and Guest) present known attack vectors for brute-force attacks and unauthorized access.
Attackers target well-known account names to gain initial access or elevate privileges on a machine.
2
Apply local account hardening best practices
Disable the built-in Guest account so it cannot be used for logon sessions, and rename the default Administrator account to a non-standard name.
This enforces principle of least privilege and obscures default administrative account identifiers.

Key Concept

Workstation Account Hardening
Rate this question

Topics

Workstation Hardening and Best Practices

More questions from this topic