The Easiest Security Issue You Can Fix

tl;dr — One of the most common security issues we encounter is everyone in the store uses the computer as a full Administrator account.

Windows User Accounts

If you’re running consignment software, there’s a good chance you’re running it on a Microsoft Windows-based system.  Out of the box, Microsoft walks you through setting your username and password.  The only issue is, this account is the full System Administrator account.

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There’s just no need to be logged-in as an Administrator for day-to-day work and especially not with staff accessing the system all day.

Microsoft Provides An Easy Solution

While it’s not clearly outlined during the setup of a new Windows PC and the information seems to only be available to nerds that have worked with systems for years, Windows has two different types of user accounts:

• Administrator
• Standard User

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The latter is the recommended account type to use for day-to-day tasks, only logging-in as the Administrator when you need to make major changes — e.g. install a new program, install/configure a printer, etc.  If you don’t have this setup already, you can create a new Windows User account to be the Administrator and then set the daily-driver account to a Standard User.

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So in simplest terms, at a bare minimum you should have one user account that is an Administrator and one user account that is a Standard User.

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Only the Standard User account is utilized as the daily-driver account.

This one, small change helps prevent unwanted changes to the system.  Combined with a good adblocker (e.g. uBlock Origin) and these two help reduce a huge amount of issues for consignment/resale stores.