Standard User on W7 home changing own status to Admin

[gbl]

I have been away from this for a while but have a problem at home, using Windows 7 Home Premium.
Three users on the computer, two admins and one standard. The standard user has apparently become able to change his status to Administrator. I am wondering how. The obvious way is to know one or both of the admin users' passwords, to login, and navigate to the right area in windows 7. But are there other ways? What programs might have been installed unknown to me that might allow the standard user to elevate himself? Does anyone know of any phone apps that can do this if the phone can join the home network (the phone uses windows 8.x, not sure if its 8.0 or 8.1)?
Any help is appreciated. I'll search other forums in the meantime.

Thank you

 

[goombawaho]

I doubt it was via the phone, but maybe somebody will chime in.

The obvious way I would get access to the ADMIN account is use a bootable CD with a password reset utility on it. Set the admin account to active if it was not and then blank the password. Voila, you are in and you can login as admin then do what you want.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[cdogg]

gbl,
I concur with Goom. There are a lot of ways to mess with the built-in Administrator account when you have physical access to a workstation. Microsoft's Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT, formerly known as ERD Commander), is just one example of a tool that is widely used for this purpose. There are also a ton of free Linux tools available on the internet.

The easiest way to lock it down is to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise and enable Bitlocker to encrypt the drive. Doing so will render a lot of those sneaky tools useless.



-Carl
"The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be."

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