Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 11th Sep 2006 17:56 UTC
A few days ago we reported on the fact that applications which have administrative rights in Vista (given by the user, of course) can disable User Account Protection altogether. This was seen as a security flaw; Ars, however, begs to differ: "When UAC is disabled, Vista gripes loudly about it. The Windows Security Center immediately notes that UAC has been turned off, and it prompts you to turn it back on using a system tray notification. From our own testing, it appears impossible to disable UAC without the Security Center noticing it, which makes it rather unlikely that a user is end up in a less secure state."
Thread beginning with comment 161409
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-06
Why was this modded down? Are people that immature that they can't discuss the issues honestly and need to actively promote censorship?
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15801&comment_id=161409
Member since:
2006-01-06
But you see, most users of alternative OSes(I mean non-Windows users) basically have more skills and knowledgements on computers in general I rekon. They could figure out whether it is some kind of trojan or not.
Yeah, that's probably true. But even experienced users can be tricked.
Also there are a lot of window managers which look totally different from each others. If I use Enligntenment R17 for DE, a GNOME/KDE app pops up and asks for root password, I think I could figure out easily even without much knowledge!
Sure, but it might be more difficult to ascertain if you're running an app for which the differences aren't so stark.
Anyway, because there is no way to turn off privilege thing in *nix world, it is impossible a malicious app gets a privileged process running or at least a lot harder than Windows. period.
It's not impossible. It's simply slightly harder. See my previous post regarding how to do that.
I don't mean *nix is perfect but at least a lot more secure than Windows. And I feel comfortable on *nix because of it.
I understand, but I think that too many people have a false sense of security about 'nix and fail to understand how easily they can be rooted by a malicious app.