Answer
To delete Windows’ built-in Administrator account, rightclick the Administrator name and select Delete. Close Registry Editor and restart your computer. When you open the Local Users and Groups window, you’ll find that the built-in Adminstrator account has been deleted successfully.
There are a couple of ways to remove the built in Administrator account.
If you have a terminal or command prompt open, type:
To login and remove your administrator account permanently:
NOTE: If you would like to create another administrator account, feel free to skip this section. See Creating an Administrative User for instructions on creating a new admin account.
Note: Your existing ‘Administrator’ must now be logged out (refer step 7). This is why I recommended that you log yourself into the Ubuntu Live Session earlier before starting any of this. To avoid confusion it will help if you know what username was created during installation; click here for more information about usernames in Ubuntu . In my case I knew that my username was ‘joe’ so I type:
If you are still logged in as the Administrator, you will be prompted to log out and login again. Now you should have a new Ubuntu installation with just one account which is not an administrative account. As mentioned above, there is also another way to remove this built in admin account that can be used if you don’t have access to a terminal or command prompt. This may be helpful for those who simply want to delete their admin user without having a dedicated administrator and using sudo exclusively. Either way I think it’s important for everyone to know how delete the default admin account but before we go into that lets talk about how we create a new admin user below!
Note: Creating an Administrative User
If you would like to create a new administrator for your Ubuntu installation, feel free to skip this section. We will be creating our Administrator user account now. The reason we do this is because when you run the sudo command from within an administrative account it gives that administrative user (you) full administration rights and permissions throughout the entire system. It’s important that every computer running Ubuntu have at least one non-administrative administrator who can use sudo without giving them full access to the entire system; otherwise if the only admin on your machine were someone with complete authority they could easily wreak havoc on your install: deleting files, installing unauthorized software etc., or even stealing information such as passwords and credit card numbers stored in encrypted files! This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust your friends and family with administrative rights (i.e. giving them sudo access), it simply means that you should choose someone who has a basic knowledge of Linux to be the only admin on your machine.
To create a new administrative user, we need to open a terminal or command prompt window by clicking Applications > Accessories > Terminal . From here type:
When prompted for a password enter in your password and press Enter then confirm your password when prompted again. Next type:
Now close out of the terminal window as we’re done using it; click on File > Quit from within the terminal menu bar (or hit Ctrl+Q) and log out of the system completely; this will start up Ubuntu’s graphical login screen.
Note: If you are going to have multiple administrative users then you should consider setting up a user account for each of them and giving that user sudo permissions; I strongly recommend against using the same administrative username among all of your accounts because this tends to cause confusion when using sudo commands (i.e. ‘sudo LOGIN’ instead of ‘sudo USERNAME’). It’s not much work to customize individual usernames so I highly suggest it over selecting the same admin username as a solution to your multi-administrative problem. You can read my full article about creating multiple administrator accounts here . Now we need to log into our new account with administrative rights; click on Log Out from the upper right hand corner and choose your name from the list of user accounts.
Now you should be logged into your new administrative account! If you have any questions or suggestions about this article please post them in the comment section below and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for reading! ~Joe
image credit: http://www.webarchitectsolutions.com/~vickihallerud/2012_09_17-Ubuntu+Administrator+Recovery~21~20131229232648~1540×836~0.jpg, http://www.tuxradar.com/content/images/tutorials/redhat-centos-opensuse-how-make-administrative-user
It’s true that it is non-standard for a Linux distribution to have an administrative account created out of the box but if you look at all of the major distributions (Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu etc.) they all do this. This isn’t always a good idea as it can result in accidental damaging of your user data and files by those who simply want to delete their admin user without having a dedicated administrator and using sudo exclusively. Either way I think it’s important for everyone to know how delete the default admin account but before we go into that lets talk about how we create a new admin user below!
If you would like to create a new administrator for your Ubuntu installation, feel free to skip this section. We will be working with the terminal, which has a bit of a learning curve at first but is very powerful once you get used to it. To access your terminal, click on Applications > Accessories > Terminal .
Installing Sudo
While logged in as a regular user (i.e. not using sudo) run the following command:
Now that we have installed sudo, we need to configure it for our administrative account so that we can use it without giving up full control of our machine; run this command from within your terminal and replace ‘YOUR-USERNAME’ with your username :
After running the above I recommend adding yourself back into the admin group so that you will have full access again later on; open a new terminal window and type:
At this point we can add our new administrative account and make it sudo privileged (i.e. able to use the sudo command). To do this run:
Replace ‘YOUR-USERNAME’ above with your selected username. Now that you have created a new admin user, go ahead and log out of the system completely then log back in as your newly created administrative user!
Now that we are logged into our new administrative user let’s see what capabilities they have; from within a terminal window run:
As you can see, our original administrative account is not part of any groups which means that not only does it have full access to the machine but it also has no restrictions at all on what commands it can use. This is extremely dangerous if you have untrusted users who will attempt to use sudo in a way that may have unintended results; for example, the last command above could be used to format your machine if run with sudo privileges and no other restrictions applied! Let’s see how we can protect ourselves from this kind of user misbehavior by restricting commands to specific users.
Restricting Commands
Again, while logged in as our normal administrative user we need to edit a file called ‘sudoers’ ; from within your terminal window type:
This command will open up/create a new file which will allow us to configure command restriction for our system; here are some basic examples:
From this you can see that I added my administrative user to the admin group and then added the ‘sudo’ command so that members of the admin group can run it with sudo privileges. You may notice that this is non-standard since my administrative user wasn’t member of the admin group (i.e. didn’t have full access); however, I decided to add them at this point since I always use my administrative account for system maintenance/update purposes. This configuration wouldn’t prevent a normal user from accessing your machine; therefore as a general rule don’t allow anyone who isn’t trusted to use sudo .
Another important resource for understanding how to configure sudoers is this website: http://www.caldera.com/developers/librarytopics/security/sudoers_
To delete Windows’ built-in Administrator account, rightclick the Administrator name and select Delete. Close Registry Editor and restart your computer. When you open the Local Users and Groups window, you’ll find that the built-in Adminstrator account has been deleted successfully.
You cannot delete the normal administrator account when you are logging in with it. So, sign-in to another administrator account (one that has administrator privileges) and then remove the one you no longer need. Windows 10’s built-in administrators cannot be completely removed from your system, but can be disabled and hidden in most cases.
The Administrator account is aptly named. It’s only purpose should be to set up the machine and join it to the enterprise domain. Once those tasks have been completed users should never use this account again, so disable it. … If any user can login with the built-in administrator account you lose all knowledge of what they’re doing as a result meaning user accountability is compromised.