I can honestly say that all of our users are "Restricted Users" on our
XP Pro and W2K Pro Workstations, and none have fallen victim to malware
or spyware.
Now yes, this could create more work, because users will not be able to
install any software or patches on the PC, but with the implementation
of management tools such as SUS or SMS (to push patches) and an Remote
control software such as VNC your PC workload will actually go down.
You will not have to worry about Spyware/Malware being installed, your
Windows Updates will be pushed automatically, and if a new piece of
software needs to be installed you can get to the Machine remotely
switch the User to an admin, drop the user back down to "restricted
user" and you are done.
Jason Albuquerque
GIS Manager
Department of Information Systems
80 Boston Neck Road
Town of North Kingstown, RI 02852
Tel. (401) 268-1516
Fax (401) 295-2594
www.northkingstown.org
love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth
C13:6
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Krough [mailto:ckrough@vet.upenn.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 3:07 PM
Cc: incidents@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods
Following the concept of least privilege is very effective at preventing
spyware installation. We've reduced the access level of most of our
users to 'Domain User'. For users who require frequent administrative
access we provide them with a secondary, preferably local only,
administrative account. For users with occasional administrative needs
we either upgrade their account temporarily or just perform the
installation/changes ourselves. This practice has almost completely
eliminated spyware problems from our network.
Depending on your users needs there is a good chance that lowering
default account privileges will increase the load on your support staff.
Installations and low-level configuration changes will require attention
from someone with administrative privileges but the time saved over
handling spyware/virus incidents is greater.
Have you upgraded your clients to XP SP2?
Illuminatus Master wrote:
Hello List,
I'm sure you all realize the growing threat of malware and spyware to
Internet Explorer. It has been my experience that the initial
infection and/or removel of an infection by anti-spyware products can
permanently damage a windows workstation. This damage occurs in many
forms and often leads too the workstation being reformatted and
rebuilt before going back into service.
A recent example is earlier this week, in spite of content filtering,
a workstation was infected with "wintools", "mysearchtoolbar" etc. The
tough part of this is that such malware has multiple instances/threads
and renames system files like msconfig to resist removal. Often
IE/Windows is so damaged it's more time effiecient to just replace the
box and rebuild the infected one.
My question is this, I'm batting around the idea of using Group Policy
in our Active Directory to try and choke IE down to the point where
such Malware has trouble installing itself. Has anyone here ever tried
such as this with any degree of success?
Other than Group Policy I'm also considering deploying an alternate
web browser that isnt subject to malware infection but doing so
complicates my patching/reporting routine for our security audits.
I look forward to your comments and idea's.
Thanks,
massa
