QB2003 paswords changed themselves

Well... ???

Perhaps Yankee Doddle Dandy broke into your office on the 4th and chaged them or someone changed them before the weekend. How do you know no one was in during the weekend? Did you look for foot prints?

Perhaps another instance of the nefarious work of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Or perhaps the two files were intimate on the hard drive.

I aim to please.

Google: quickbooks+password+crack yields 387,000 entries.

Have you checked upper/lower case?

Did you try going into a text based program to see if characters are being typed as intended?

Could your file have gotten corrupted?

Any worker leaving/being fired who might have sabatoged the file? Does someone have access to the computer from offsite? (Gotomypc?)

(I'd especially look at the last part. Some fired/laid off employeess have beeen known to do this.

How did you learn the random, new password?

I had an odd occurrence on an older version of QB after tax season (QB 2004 I think). A set of books which was not pass word protected began requiring a password and the user name was that of another client which is password protected. The problem is, the password is not the same. So I no longer have access to the books.

Sincerely, Joanne

Your ass is showing, "greatguy."

J

Gee, and I thought it would not occur to anyone to ask...:)

Yes.

Thank you very much.

My pleasure. I'm a sucker for a damsel in distress, though, truth be told, I've distressed a damsel or two (eighteen, actually).

It's what he talks with, and it shows.

1) I don't know how you found out what the passwords were changed to as in every copy I've ever seen of 2003 there is no way to display a password! If you have some third party password hacker program that is where I would start looking for why they changed and how the file got damaged. 2) You say you can't change them, that would be file corruption, rebuild.

3) Can you create a new user/pw? If you can't that would be file corruption, rebuild.

4) Does anyone have access (physical or electronic [go to my pc]) to the machine where the data file is stored? Especially anyone recently fired?

I tried again to change the admin password, and this time I was successful. I have not tried setting up a new user id yet. This is a small office with only a handful of staffers. Everyone has been there for a while. After this problem occurred, I also tried accessing backup copies stored in out of the way places on other computers, and had the same problem. I also tried it from two other computers on the network, with the same results. I don't have a clue as to what is going on, but I can tell you that this is my company's data file, with our billings and other important financial data. If I had not been able to get at the new passwords, I would have had a serious problem.

I doubt anyone (or anything) went and changed all your backups. I'm letting fly with an assumption that you have been logging in and out without problems up to a specific point in time and that some of the backups you tried (and checked the modification date/time stamp) were from before the time of the password changing. If so I suspect you have an active malware problem. You need to run virus, spybot, key logger, malware and other such vandalizing programs checks on every machine connected to your office network until you find and disable it on each machine it has infected. If you can isolate the date/time it happened you might be able to look at some log files and see what users were doing at that time. Might be able to find the offending e-mail or website someone surfed. Then again it might cover its tracks. But this is a side issue to getting multiple virus/spyware checkers going on each machine until you find the problem.

Define tried it from two other computers on the network. Does this mean you sat down at different workstations and opened various client files and found the same results? Have you tried opening the files on a computer that is off site?

Hate to say this but is there any chance that the passwords did not change, only your recollection of them. Hey when you are going crazy strange things tend to happen. Don't dismiss this theory, major part of crazy is also denial. For example look at our friend nospam. Do you think he knows that he is crazy?

All kidding aside I believe this is the work of a disgruntled employee but I have not fully dismissed the crazy theory. I will keep a close look at your future posts.

I don't have

Mad Cow Disease?

[comments at bottom]

The company file in question is our own company file. We also work on client QuickBooks files, but the problem is with our own. Each of our four staffers has a pw comprising his/her initials followed by the same four number. The new pw's are a random set of letters and numbers. The file is located on our file server running Windows 2003 Server, Enterprise Edition. About six computers have access to the file server, and four have QuickBooks installed. I attempted to log into our company files from three of the four computers that have QuickBooks installed.

After reading the responses, several of which addressed a serious issue with flippant answers (would they feel it to be so humorous if it were their own files instead of mine?), I am no closer to an answer than I was originally. However, I do not think it was sabotage by a disgruntled employee (two were actually on vacation all of last week), nor do I think we simply forgot our passwords. I do believe it possible that some sort of malware specific to QuickBooks (no other files were effected) was at work, or there was spontaneous corruption that effected only passwords. Of course, this is mere speculation. I have no hard evidence to support these theories. BTW, I did not take one additional step I could have taken...I could try an older backup copy stored off premises, either from a portable hard drive or a DVD. If I get a chance, I will try older backups to see if they will open. My local backups may have already been overwritten by the errant file before I tried them.