unkown user acount with win xp

[Chillazilla]

There is a very strange user acount that has just popped up in my security settings for all of my drives except C:\

It is just a long string of numbers and i cant remove this. Im assuming that a hacker put it there for himself. I tried removing it and it just says cannot remove it because it is inheriting its rights from a parent. The parent is probably of the root drive but i cant find it in the list of users for that drive so maybe it is hidden somehow?

Please help if you can. Thank you.

[cgkanchi]

Have you reinstalled XP recently? If so it's probably just a vestige of your old system. If not, delete the account like this:
Go to My Computer -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Local Users and Groups -> Users.
Then just delete the account.
Cheers,
cgkanchi

[zigar]

this is not necessarily a hacker...it might be you...and by deleting willy-nilly...you could cause yourself some anguish

the long strings of numbers are SID's or Security Indentifiers

for some reason user accounts sometimes show up as sid's and sometimes as usernames...



the starting character strings for some common sid's can be found here
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q243330

this will give you an idea of where to start in tracking down what the sid is...

here's a hint with 2k and xp...DON"T go recklessly deleting permissions or users until you really know what they mean...

i'll look around for a bit more info for yo...

[Chillazilla]

hey thanks alot, i didnt know the numbers actually meant something And yeah i learned not to go deleting strange user acounts and permissions the hard way. I think it was just something screwy that happened when i reinstalled xp...ownership on 3 of my 4 drivers were replaced with this long string of numbers, so i just went back and replaced it with my acount and that took care of it. Although i ended up locking myself out of a few folders for a while till i could figure out a way to get back in >_< Really tho, thanx for your help.

[cgkanchi]

Challazilla, if you have reinstalled xp, then that's your problem. All you have to do, is take ownership of all those files that show that user (as Administrator) and then delete the account. Same thing happened to me when I reinstalled xp. And my box is working fine now.
Cheers,
cgkanchi

[{P²P}Apocalypse]

Originally posted here by cgkanchi
Challazilla, if you have reinstalled xp, then that's your problem. All you have to do, is take ownership of all those files that show that user (as Administrator) and then delete the account. Same thing happened to me when I reinstalled xp. And my box is working fine now.
Cheers,
cgkanchi

Very true. This works for the most part. However if you have files on an NTFS formated drive and you use EFS (XP Pro & Win2000 Pro)on it. The files in it can't be recovered after instalation unless you have a backup of the users in the previous SAM file. All you will get is garbage even if you take ownership. So it's good to keep a backup of those type files on a CDR in a safe place.