Scan questions

Access is denied

Q: How do I deal with the errors “Access is denied” or “Unknown user name or bad password”?

A: These errors can occur for several reasons:

• Username or password is specified incorrectly.
  Check your username and password.

• The specified user account does not have administrator rights on the remote machine.
  You need to have administrator access to remote computers to be able to scan them (local administrator or domain administrator rights). If you have logged on as a domain administrator or remote computers have the same name and password for the local administrator account as your account, you can use the Current user scan option. Otherwise specify the user name in full format: DOMAIN\Administrator.

• Blank password.
  Remote administrator access with a blank password is not allowed starting with Windows XP.

• Computers are not in the domain and have default settings.
  Workstations running Windows and not connected to a domain don’t allow the local administrator to authenticate as himself by default. Instead, the ForceGuest policy is used, which means that all remote connections are mapped to the Guest account. But again, the administrator rights are required for running the scan. Thus, you need to update the security policy on each computer using one of the following ways:
• Run secpol.msc, expand Local policies / Security options, locate the Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts policy, and change its value from Guest to Classic;
• Disable the Use simple file sharing option in File Explorer’s Folder Options;
• Modify the registry: set the forceguest value, located in the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa” key, to zero.