Where do you go for your IT advice? I hope it is from a trusted source. From what I have been seeing on social media it is a bit scary. This post is actually a bit of rant and a bit of a warning. I’ve been watching a lot of IT support videos on a lot of different social media platforms and one of the platforms who shall remain nameless had a person give advice on how to get people to stop spying on your on your computer.
What Was The Advice?
The advice was simple…. run the netplwiz command and delete any accounts that were unknown to you because those accounts could be ones that were “spying” on you.
In my opinion this is quite haphazard advice because you can do a lot of damage to your computer if you don’t understand what you’re doing. When someone gives you advice and tells you to just do something and they don’t tell you why chances are they don’t really understand what they are doing. It reminds me of a quote from Albert Einstein. To paraphrase, he basically said that if you can’t explain something simply enough another person then you don’t know it well enough yourself.
What Poor Advice Will Actually Do to Your Computer
So, what could happen if you follow this advice? I will give you a run through. This person had you run the netplwiz command which brings up the user account control panel. In my example I have two accounts shown:
Here’s thing. I am an IT professional; I set these accounts up and I know what these accounts do. But most people who use computers set it up right out of the box. They follow a wizard, and they really have no idea what accounts are on the computer so why would you delete them? Now if you’re really into security (and you should be) you would take your Administrator account and rename it and then disable it for good measure (Make sure it is not the only account on the machine lol).
I looked in the comments one person said, “I deleted the account called Administrator and now I can’t do anything with my computer”.
That’s what happens when you give advice without explaining why you’re giving the advice My advice to you is don’t do this! Chances are if your computer was set up right out of the box you have one account on it and it’s your account. If you have more than one account, it’s probably your account and an administrator account and with Windows the administrator is disabled out of the box.
How Malware Really Works
If any bad actor was to spy on you, they would need you to download and install some malware on your computer. At that point they would just use the account you’re currently logged in to spy on you through key logging or any type of other deployed malware, but you must download an infected file or attachment and you have to release it’s payload.
The Takeaway
So please, if you see any advice and you’re not sure what do with it do some research or better yet follow me and I can give you all the tips you need and more importantly I’ll explain why you need to do it.
Follow me on LinkedIn, YouTube or Tiktok.
Happy IT’ing Dan
Dan
I am an IT professional with over twenty years experience in the field. I have supported thousands of users over the years. The organizations I have worked for range in size from one person to hundreds of people. I have performed support from Help Desk, Network / Cloud Administration, Network Support, Application Support, Implementation and Security.