The simple way to stop serious Microsoft software flaws? Take away 'admin' rights
Running Windows users with ‘standard’ rather than ‘administrator’ rights would have removed over 90 percent of the risk posed by critical vulnerabilities reported in Microsoft products last year, an analysis by privilege management firm Avecto has found.
The firm first looked at 333 vulnerabilities reported by Microsoft in 2013 across all products in its monthly Security bulletins, finding that 60 percent would have been mitigated by removing admin rights. Studying only the 147 rated as the most serious, the mitigation level reached an astonishing 92 percent.
Breaking down the numbers by products, Avecto found that 96 percent of critical flaws were mitigated by removing admin rights on all versions of Windows up to version 8; for Internet Explorer, it was 100 percent, for Office it was 91 percent while even on Windows Server 2003, 2010 and 2012 it was 96 percent. More than half of the vulnerabilities involved Remote Code Execution.
