Re: How to Assign a Password to Guest Account

From: Bob Stringer (bob_at_NotHere.net)
Date: 01/17/05 

Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:07:57 -0800

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 06:00:25 -0800, OShah <shexec32@aol.com>
wrote:

>Are you running XP Professional or XP Home?

Home.

>[snip]

>There is a way to set a password on the guest account on Home,
> but I won't tell you how to do it (hint: google).
>
> It's highly recommended you DO NOT set a password on the
> guest account.
> Doing so can cripple XP's networking features.

The reason I wanted to assign a password was that in several
different places I had seen the recommendation to do so as a
security measure.

By googling as you suggested, I've now seen a lot of
comments about not truly *disabling* the guest account, but
nothing warning against password-protecting it. To the
contrary, I again see references to the guest account's
being a "hacker hole" and recommendations to assign a strong
password to it. Here are just a few examples:

<http://netsecurity.about.com/cs/windowsxp/a/aa042204_2.htm>
<http://labmice.techtarget.com/articles/winxpsecuritychecklist.htm>
<http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/SecureXP.html>

I'm not knowledgeable about computers, so I have no way of
judging any of this. But before I read what you wrote, from
a common sense standpoint it made sense to me that a
password *should* be assigned to the guest account, for the
same reason that it's a good idea to assign passwords to
regular user accounts.

Now that you say that giving it a password will cripple
WinXP's networking feature, I'm certainly not going to do
it, but then I still have the question: why isn't it a
security risk to leave the guest account open to the world?
How is that different from not assigning passwords to other
user accounts?

Thanks very much. 

-- 
Bob Stringer

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: How to Assign a Password to Guest Account
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