It seems I’ve been preoccupied lately with telling all of you about the things you shouldn’t do anymore. Between blowing away firewall rules and killing security technologies, I guess I’ve become that guy. Now get off my lawn!

But why stop now – I’m on a roll. This week, let’s take on another common practice that ends up being an extraordinarily bad idea – running user devices with administrator access. Let’s slay that sacred cow.

Once again, most of you security folks with any kind of kung fu are already here. You’d certainly not let an unsophisticated user run with admin rights, right? They might do something like install software or even click on a bad link and get pwned. Yeah, it’s been known to happen.

Thus the time has come for the rest of the great unwashed to get with the program. Your standard build (you have a standard build, right? If not, we’ll talk about that next week in the Endpoint Fundamentals Series) should dictate user devices run as standard users. Take that and put it in your peace pipe.

Impact
Who cares? Why are we worried about whether a user runs as a standard or admin user? To state the obvious: admin rights on endpoint devices represent the keys to the kingdom. These rights allow users to install software, mess with the registry under Windows, change all sorts of config files, and generally do whatever they want on the device. Which wouldn’t be that bad if we only had to worry about legitimate users.

Today’s malware doesn’t require user interaction to do its damage, especially on devices running with local admin access. All the user needs to do is click the wrong link and it’s game over – malware installed and defenses rendered useless, all without the user’s knowledge. Except when they are offered a great deal on “security software,” get a zillion pop-ups, or notice their machine grinding to a halt.

To be clear, users can still get infected when running in standard mode, but the attack typically ends at logout. Without access to the registry (on Windows) and other key configuration files, malware generally expires when the user’s session ends.

Downside
As with most of the tips I’ve provided over the past few weeks, user grumpiness may result once they start running in standard mode. They won’t be able to install new software and some of their existing applications may break. So use this technique with care. That means you should actually test whether every application runs in standard user mode before you pull the trigger. Business critical applications probably need to be left alone, as offensive as that is.

Most applications should run fine, making this decision a non-issue, but use your judgement on allowing certain users to keep admin rights (especially folks who can vote you off the island) to run a specific application. Yet I recommend you stamp your feet hard and fast if an application doesn’t play nicely in standard mode. Yell at your vendors or internal developers to jump back into the time machine and catch up with the present day. It’s ridiculous that in 2010 an end-user facing application would require admin rights.

You also have the “no soup for you” card, which is basically the tough crap response when someone gripes about needing admin rights. Yes, you need to have a lot of internal mojo to pull that off, but that’s what we are all trying to build, right? Being able to do the right security thing and make it stick is the hallmark of an effective CISO.

Discuss
So there you have it. This is a FireStarter, so fire away, sports fans. Why won’t this work in your environment? What creative, I mean ‘legitimate’, excuses are you going to come up with now to avoid doing proper security hygiene on the endpoints? This isn’t that hard, and it’s time. So get it done, or tell me why you can’t…

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