If you work with the ADMINISTRATOR without a password, than it can be
unsecure.
Logon from the network with a blank password has been disabled since Windows
XP, so no. On the contrary, you would probably be MORE secure with a blank
password than with one of the very weak ones ("password" "1234" "letmein"
"1111") that too many people use.
Give me one good reason to remove them. What SPECIFIC threat are you trying
to mitigate by removing them?
No it would not. First, the shares are only accessible by a properly
authenticated administrator. If I have administrative access to your machine,
but you have turned these shares off, it is a matter of 10 lines of code to
turn them back on again, or turn on something else that I would rather use.
Removing these shares in no way restricts a remote, malicious, administrator
from accessing your system.
Second, why are you talking about a non-firewalled system at all? Vista has
a built-in firewall, that is on by default, that blocks access to these
shares, by default. In addition, there are multiple other layers of
protection against compromise via the administrative shares. Sure, if you
turn off the firewall, enable the ability to log on without a password,
remove the password from the built-in administrator account, enable that
account, turn off user account control, AND (not or) hook the system up to
the Internet, then yes, you have put yourself at risk. Are you planning on
doing that? If so, can I have your IP address?
Third, on a non-domain joined Windows Vista system you get a restricted
token when logging on remotely with an administrative account defined in the
local SAM. That means that you will fail the access check for the
administrative shares because your token has the Administrators SID set for
deny only. In other words, on a non-domain joined Windows Vista system, these
shares are inaccessible from the network already, for a number of reasons. On
a domain-joined Vista system they are accessible from the network when the
machine is in the domain or private firewall profiles, but only for someone
using a domain account that is in the local admins group.
Finally, you have yet to describe a risk with leaving these shares on. So
has everyone else, who have never built an operating system and yet, for
twelve years have been telling people to modify core functionality in the
operating system. Nobody has yet been able to present a solid case where this
presents a real threat that outweighs the potential risk of modifying how the
OS works. You do not know what software needs these shares. There is an
unknown risk inherent in disabling them. That unknown risk is to be pitted
against the undefined security risk involved in leaving them on. In the
absence of any information pointing one way or the other in this debate, why
should we do anything at all? Why should we modify how our operating system
works if there is no reason to do so?
