Validating Windows Creds

I wanna make a really quick post here about this. Normally I generally right click a app on the taskbar, and then shift+right click the app icon, and in the context menu pick “run as a different user”. then I get a credentials box prompt asking me to enter the creds of the user and their password, and if successful open the app (generally cmd).

This time I was testing some old credentials used for a particular service, but I wasn’t sure of the password, I also wasn’t sure exactly where this account was all used, so was hesitant to just go and change the accounts password.

I did my usual trick as stated above and got the user was not allowed local logon for this machine, which was a good thing, some standard best practices for the account were implemented. This however still left me with the assumption the user/password was correct, but not 100% sure.

attempting the same thing with a random known bad password sure enough responded with wrong username/password. Giving me pretty confident results the username and password I entered were correct.

I found this serverfault post about the same question, and I attempted the simple “net use” trick. Sure enough they also do the run as trick I stated in the first paragraph.

net use \\%userdnsdomain% /user:%userdomain%\%username% *

on my main machine I got an error of multiple connections not allowed, I attempted the fix posted by themadmax

net use /delete \\unc\path

which didn’t work probably cause this path I was testing against was a mapped drive for my local logged in user. I followed up by running the commands from an alternative machine I knew had access to the share and DC’s.

Sure enough this worked, I am now confident the username and password are correct.

Hope this helps someone!