LUA part 1 (of 5): Why you shouldn't always log into Windows as an administrator

[johnckirk]

The German government have advised people to stop using Internet Explorer and switch to an alternate browser, as reported at the BBC and Mashable. Microsoft have published a security advisory about the problem, and they've discussed it on their Security Research & Defense blog. Personally, I'm using IE8 (Protected Mode) on Windows Vista with DEP

Comments

[susannahf]

I used to run my home machine as a limited user, but I finally decided that it was more secure to run as an administrator. Why? Well, exactly the point that you mention above in fact. "If you get a message saying that there's a new version of Adobe Reader available, you won't be able to upgrade it with your standard account. However, this should be fairly rare; for most people, I'd say that this will happen once a fortnight

[johnckirk]

Fair point - this is actually a lot easier in Vista/7, because the UAC elevation prompt works better than "Run As..." (I'll elaborate on this in part 4.)

For instance, every time I run FileZilla it will check for a new version: on XP, I could download the new version, but then the installation would fail, so I had to manually run the setup program later. On Vista/7, FileZilla tries to run the setup program, then Windows says "Ah, that's an admin job and you're not logged in as an admin user", so it pops up a dialog box asking me to type in a username and password to install it. Setup then runs smoothly, and I immediately run the new version (with my standard user account), without having to log out.

In your case, you obviously know enough about computers that you can assess the risks and make the appropriate trade-off. In a similar way, I don't use AV software at home, but I wouldn't recommend that approach to other people.