Things that make you go HMMMMM
I read this last week and thought….that makes perfect sense, why don’t companies just do it though? Nine of out 10 critical bugs reported by Microsoft last year could have been made moot, or at least made less dangerous, if people ran Windows without administrative rights.
I worked for a few organizations managing or overseeing desktop deployments and I was a firm believer in locking down workstations and especially laptops by Group Policy and effective rights management. With the advent of things like App-V and VDI solutions, there is no reason to allow users to have anything but a locked down computer experience that still provides the application experience required.
<taken from the article below>
The vast majority of critical Microsoft vulnerabilities -- 92% of them -- could have been mitigated by stripping users of administrative rights, said John Moyer, the CEO of BeyondTrust. "This speaks to what enterprises should be doing," Moyer said. "Clearly, eliminating administrative rights can close the window of opportunity of attack."
Of the 154 bugs published and patched by Microsoft in 2008, critical or not, 69% would have been blocked or their impact reduced by configuring users to run without administrative rights, said the company.
When BeyondTrust looked at the vulnerabilities patched for Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer (IE), and its application suite, Office, it found that 89% of the former and 94% of the latter could have been stymied by denying users administrative privileges.
"We were surprised to see how large the number was," said Scott McCarley, the company's director of marketing. "It really drives home how critical a role [rights] play."
Begin planning to eliminate end user Administrative rights: It’s not an impossibility, folks.
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