How to Setup Account Lockout Policy in Windows 10

If you are one who values security then you’ve landed to the right place. This step by step guide will teach you how to set up an account lockout policy to user accounts in your Windows. In fact, setting up this feature ensures that your user account will be safe should there be failed attempts to log in to your account. The settings pages provide a means to tweak the number of times that the failed attempts will trigger the automatic lockout and the duration for which this lockout should last.

Here are a few simple steps to guide you in setting up account lockout Policy for your Windows 10 PC.

Step 1

Hit your windows button and search for ‘Administrative tools’ followed by return key (Enter) or click on it once it resurfaces from the search.

Alternatively, you can launch the ‘Administrative Tools’ command by searching for Control panel as shown below; Fortunately, it happens to be the first on the list.

Step 2

Navigate all the way to the ‘Local Security Policy’ and double click on it to open it.

This shall pop up the ‘Local Security Policy’ that will allow you to expand some directories.

Step 3

Begin by expanding the Account policies by clicking on the arrow that faces to the right or by double clicking on the name tag, ‘Account Policies’

Highlight the, ‘Account Lockout Policy’ by single clicking on it.

Now navigate to ‘Account Lockout Threshold’ and double click on it.

By default, the logon attempts are usually set to zero. Leaving this value as zero means that your user account will never be locked. However, altering this value to the desired value will dictate the number of times that a failed password attempt will activate the automatic account lockout.

Windows 10 allows that one sets up to a maximum of 999 failed logon attempts on this window.

You now need to set the desired number of failed logons attempts that will trigger the automatic account lockout.

After setting this up, then the ‘account lockout duration’ and the ‘Reset account lockout counter after’ buttons will be active for tweaking as well. Normally the defaults are set to 30min each but this figure can be adjusted up to 99,999min.

Step 4

Once you’ve set the desired number of failed logons (it doesn’t necessarily have to be 3 times), you need to launch the command prompt and manually update the group policy by running the following command;

gpupdate

After this update, you can test whether your setup has completed successfully. If successful, a page will appear stating that, ‘The reference account is currently locked out and may not be logged on to’ as shown below.

Congratulations, you’ve successfully beefed up your windows 10 security.

Conclusion

Locking your computer in this manner will mean that you’ll either have to wait for the dictated duration before attempting to key in the password again, or simply let the super administrator override this rule. We hope you’ll make adjustments on your windows 10 to the desired level of security.