Disable 92% of Windows vulnerabilities

According to BeyondTrust, it is possible to limit the damage or completely avoid attacks on Windows vulnerabilities without logging in as an administrator.

By studying all of the Windows operating system vulnerabilities discovered in 2008, BeyondTrust, a security firm, said that 92% of those vulnerabilities do not affect users at all or at least be less dangerous. a lot if they do not log in to the computer with administrative rights (administration).

John Moyer, the company's CEO, said: ' This is a good suggestion for businesses because it is clear that not logging in with administrative rights will control most attacks '. According to BeyondTrust research, 69% of the total of 154 vulnerabilities that Microsoft patched in 2008 (including serious or non-serious vulnerabilities) will not affect the user's system at all. Attacks aimed at that vulnerability can only be performed by administrative rights.

If only the vulnerabilities of the Internet browser and Microsoft Office text editing software are included, there are 89% of the old holes and 94% of the new vulnerabilities will become harmless to the user before the attacks. when their computer is not logged in with administrative rights. ' We feel quite surprised by such a large percentage, ' said Scott McCarley, the company's marketing director.

In addition, the use of administrative rights on Windows versions is a controversial issue because last week, a group of bloggers posted a code snippet and demonstrated a complete disable attack tactic. Full user account management (UAC) functionality on the operating system is being tested Windows 7 - one of the security features that Microsoft introduced from Windows Vista in 2007.

' That is the most vivid example of how dangerous it is to log on to a computer using administrative rights. Hackers will not be able to do anything even if they have hacked into the system if it is just a 'guest' account , 'Scott McCarley said.

Microsoft then denied it was considered a vulnerability in Windows 7.