Adding a password when you installed without setting the password for startup a question that has puzzled me but never needed it.

Now a customer did not set his password and this evil man who has got into his phones his laptops his router his neighbour's laptops with Windows which he infected but every time he tried to delete and reinstall windows it wanted him to load the windows already on his machine. Both machines do this has he has infected them both.

He has through this emptied his bank account and he is in real trouble. He is an ex tenant living now two streets away yet does this remotely and he believes he has set up a bluetooth and wireless device somewhere in his house as he is going through bluetooth which has only a short range.

Sunday before last we reformatted his best laptop fastest one I have ever seen with the latest AMD Raytheon with Gparted and installed Linux Mint 19.2 64 bit unfortunetly he did not set a logon password.

He came back this week this evil person has now got into his Linux Mint 19.2 and into the Firewall where the log shows several hours of attempts to get in until he finally did.

We have reinstalled now with a logon password this time.

I expect to see him back next Sunday.

I gave him Tails super secure operating system that runs live of a dvd and does not install on the hard disk, so if the nasty does it again he might avoid him and get on the internet with the Tor browser.

Which leads me to my questions.

Can he set up a WiFi blocker to stop this which he has bought.

How can he trace a bluetooth device transponder.

How do you put a logon password in when you did not setup one on the installation?

How can you protect your firewall as well?

Thanks for your help.

to answer the question in the title ( I glazed over with the rest tbh )

and to set a root password

Update router firmware, or upgrade/replace it if there are no new updates!
Set strong WiFi (login password for admin account), and setup strong different password to connect to WiFi.
You can also go thru trouble of MAC address filtering. Look at router documentation.
If the WiFi router is provided by ISP, contact them.

Disable bluetooth when not in use!


Firerat provided answer to this...

Granted I have not tried all the different Mint desktop ISOs but of the ones I have tried an empty or blank password is not allowed and the installation will not continue until something is entered and confirmed. However, something like a single space is allowed. In addition there is a box you can check to automatically login but that does change or remove the password.

Without a known user password sudo will not work either and you need to boot to recovery mode and drop to a root shell to reset the password. Supposedly the shift key when booting will display the grub menu and allow you to enter recovery mode but it isn't working on my virtual machine.

Although this is OBE (overcome by events) since you have since reinstalled the operating system.

Security is hole different topic.