Get rid of Admin rights on Windows 7 and say goodbye to security exploits
April 1, 2010 Computer Safety Tip
Windows 7 with all its wonderful and innovative aspects is still plagued with security exploits, and users across the 
board are on the daily hunt for a solution to these many vulnerabilities.
It has been reported by BeyondTrust that at least 90 percent of all Windows 7 vulnerabilities can be eradicated by simply configuring the Operating System to run as a normal user, as opposed to an administrator.
As is mentioned in BeyondTrust’s Microsoft Vulnerability report, “Removing administrator rights would also protect against exploitation of all of the Office holes reported last year, 94 percent of Internet Explorer flaws and 100 percent of IE 8 flaws reported last year, and 64 percent of all Microsoft vulnerabilities reported in that time period…”
Of course there are certain disadvantages to running your Operating System as a standard user, for example, standard users will typically not be able to install software and use various applications which in turn require elevated privileges.
The thing lacking in Windows 7 which was present in Windows Vista is the User Account Control technology (UAC) – which allows for a standard user to be awarded privileges of an administrator, provided the administrator opts to elevated the particular privileges.
As is mentioned by Scott McCarley, the marketing director of BeyondTrust:
“BeyondTrust offers a product called Privilege Manager that allows a user to run processes that normally require elevated privileges without needing admin rights. When you encounter something that requires elevated privileges it will prompt you for your admin login credentials, but standard users don’t have admin logins in most corporate settings,”, he goes on to add that UAC in Windows 7 does not affect standard users in any way, shape or form.
When asked to comment on the above, Microsoft spokesperson, Paul Cooke (director of Windows Client Product Management at Microsoft) had this to say:
“We have enabled additional Windows operations that users perform often to work without administrative rights. We believe that running users as standard users is good for Windows, the ecosystem, and all of our users,” he said. “It is our hope that with the help of UAC that ISVs (independent software vendors) will continue to adapt their software to work well with standard user rights.”
One can clearly see that although Microsoft is still heaps ahead of many of its competitors – there is still a ways to go in light of combating all the security vulnerabilities.
Safe to assume that in time all these forums and articles will only benefit us, the internet and computing community – and soon all malware and security breaches will be done away with – well a girl can hope – cant she?
Comments (1)
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