None of my users run with local admin rights. Not even my boss. Not even HER boss--the superintendent of schools, at the top of our org chart.
The volume of information available to show why this is a best practice is overwhelming. But then, I suspect you already know this. It does help that top management in our organization supports this. All we had to do was to explain to our superintendent the risks associated with granting users local admin rights, and he was on board. John Hornbuckle, MSMIS, PMP MIS Department Taylor County School District www.taylor.k12.fl.us From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:23 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: This is what I get.... Here's how much fight I get when I even SUGGEST we should be removing admin right from our users. Worthy to note I am not a local admin on my own NWEA machine, and none of my %sidejob% clients are local admins on theirs. This guy knows this, but still fights me every time. This reply incensed me enough to start again working on the management buy-in, as it's a lot harder to stop a top down order. Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 6:35 AM To: David Lum Subject: RE: IE 0-day, MS releases bulletin We have this very rare instance of a Zero Day attack in IE for a few sites and you think that is a reason to create the complete nightmare of taking away Admin rights to a local machine. Clearly you don't know how often our users are using their admin rights on their machines. The SD got a call once a week from the ONE person who had that setup when she was moved to Windows 7. If we spent some time building the infrastructure that makes such a situation workable (like I did at the school district I worked at), then we could live with our 500 users not being admins. David Grand From: David Lum Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 6:24 AM Subject: IE 0-day, MS releases bulletin Please read this article and weigh in on the suggested workarounds. Microsoft has released a bulletin on this, and has suggested workarounds. Most can be achieved via GPO: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2757760 Note 1: "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights." SD - this exact scenario is the benefit of users not being local administrators. Note 2: Some of this is already done via the Trusted Site GPO. Their additional recommendations recommend disabling ActiveX for Internet and Local Intranet. The latter would disable some Commons functionality, but we can disable it on the Internet site zone temporarily. Even this will generate Service Desk calls but I feel this is worth mitigating the risk. Dave From: David Lum Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 12:39 PM Subject: Just so you know that I know.. 0-day of the week: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231367/Hackers_exploit_new_IE_zero_day_vulnerability?source=rss_latest_content&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fnews%2Ffeed+%28Latest+from+Computerworld%29 Dave ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
