Power user privilege question . .

From: Grey Ash (ccarmadillo_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/28/03 

Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 00:59:43 -0700

Hi all. I have a small home network of a few computers for
my family. I was wondering if there is a
hack/virus/trojan/ other bad automated way for someone to
elevate a power user to administrator privileges. My
younger brother managed to take a power user account and
raise it up to administrator levels. I'm quite sure he
didn't do it deliberately. And this makes me believe that
he installed something off the web accidentally by
clicking 'yes' when he should have clicked 'no' or opened
an email that he shouldn't have maybe with a script or
something attached. I really am not sure but I'm confident
he didn't go through the steps to hack his account. Oh, I
should also add that even though I demoted the account in
question to user level, it still retains admin privileges.
And also some of the local security policies were changed
("Enforce password history", "Disable task
manager", "Disable lock computer", and a few more)
Now, I read that one can do this sort of administrative
privilege thing with a bug in NAV Corp. Ed. but I actually
(yes, quite boneheaded of me, I know) forgot to install it
on that particular machine. Can anyone else think of other
ways to do this that would also make changes to the group
policies? (Ah yes, I should also mention that I failed to
update any security patches after SP2 thinking our
firewall would save us.) TIA . .

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