Hi everyone,

My PDC is locking up my domain administrator (administrateur in french) account.

System event logs :

The SAM database was unable to lockout the account of Administrateur due to a resource error, such as a hard disk write failure (the specific error code is in the error data) . Accounts are locked after a certain number of bad passwords are provided so please consider resetting the password of the account mentioned above.

Level : Error
Source : Directory-Services-SAM
Event ID : 12294
Computer : Contoso-PDC
User : System

There is absolutely no events in the security events log, not a single "Audit Failure" event for the "administrateur" account.

I tried to change the name of the domain administrator account from "administrateur" to "administrator".

Now there is "Audit failure" events poping up in the security event logs.

Once again the Source Workstation is the PDC. I guess those events are there because it receive credential validation for an account who doesn't exist anymore since it have been renamed in "Administrator".

Here is the detail log :

An account failed to log on.

Subject:
	Security ID:		NULL SID
	Account Name:		-
Account Domain:		-
	Logon ID:		0x0

Logon Type:			3

Account For Which Logon Failed:
	Security ID:		NULL SID
	Account Name:		Administrateur
	Account Domain:		CONTOSO

Failure Information:
	Failure Reason:		Unknown user name or bad password.
	Status:			0xc000006d
	Sub Status:		0xc0000064

Process Information:
	Caller Process ID:	0x0
	Caller Process Name:	-

Network Information:
	Workstation Name:	CONTOSO-PDC
	Source Network Address:	-
	Source Port:		-

Detailed Authentication Information:
	Logon Process:		NtLmSsp 
	Authentication Package:	NTLM
	Transited Services:	-
	Package Name (NTLM only):	-
	Key Length:		0

This event is generated when a logon request fails. It is generated on the computer where access was attempted.

The Subject fields indicate the account on the local system which requested the logon. This is most commonly a service such as the Server service, or a local process such as Winlogon.exe or Services.exe.

The Logon Type field indicates the kind of logon that was requested. The most common types are 2 (interactive) and 3 (network).

The Process Information fields indicate which account and process on the system requested the logon.

The Network Information fields indicate where a remote logon request originated. Workstation name is not always available and may be left blank in some cases.

The authentication information fields provide detailed information about this specific logon request.
	- Transited services indicate which intermediate services have participated in this logon request.
	- Package name indicates which sub-protocol was used among the NTLM protocols.
	- Key length indicates the length of the generated session key. This will be 0 if no session key was requested.

On the PDC i checked :

Services : None of them are started with the "administrateur" account

Network Share : There is no network share ...

Task Scheduler : None of the tasks are launch with the "administrateur" account.

And the logon type (3:network) seem to indicate that the login comes from an other computer but i have nothing to look for, not a single IP.

Any ideas?

ps : Sorry for the probable english mistakes :(

Hello,

Follow below thread , dfinitely will help you. It seems an attack on your account can be caused by any malicious,virus etc.. aswell

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/4a707db0-f8d9-47f2-b89b-4f9848d36e55/error-id-12294-directoryservicessam

Regards,

Biju Kurup

• Proposed as answer by i.biswajithMicrosoft community contributor Friday, April 03, 2015 6:11 PM

I have seen that when we had Conficker with one of my clients before. We had to cleanup the malware on all the managed systems to get rid of that.

Hello 

Have you tried lockout tools ?If not

Can you run Windows account lockout tool to make sure on which server(DC) the ID is getting locked ? Once done run Event comb tool( which also comes with lockout tool) on that DC with Builtin Account lockout search this will create the log for all account lockouts.

Open the log and search for event ID 644 (if windows 2003) or 4740 ( for win 2008 ) you can see many accounts there however search until you get  your domain account . It give you where the bad attempt generated .  

Hi,

Thanks for you answers.

San4wish :

Lockout tool confirm that the domain administrator account is locked on my PDC. I didn't run eventcomb but i though it only helped parsing security event logs which i did "manually". Anyway i'll try eventcomb after this week end.

About the conficker worm : I looked into it and this worm was exploiting a vulnerability in the server service. It have been patched by MS08-067 (KB958644) and this kb isn't available for Windows 2008 R2 and Windwos 2012 so i guess Windows 2008 R2 have fixed this vulnerabilty.

So i doubt its a conficker type worm.

Also i gave the PDC role to another DC (let's call him DC2) and now DC2 is locking the administrator account so it seems that the computer locking the account is doing it through the network and it's not something executed on the DCs.

LDAP binds could look like local authentications for the DCs. Maybe you can enable LDAP logging and check if it is not coming from this.

Hi,

If the domain controller receive numerous failure authentication requests for the account in the same time (the common reason is worm virus or third-party software). Since the domain controller is busy to update the account lockout threshold, doesn't have enough disk resource to set the account as locked out, then generate the SAM 12294 events. When the domain controller has the enough resource, the account will be locked out if we configured Account Lockout policy. 

Regards.