Does removing admin rights really mitigate 90% of Critical Windows 7 vulnerabilities found to date?
- by Jordan Weinstein
Beyondtrust.com published a report, somewhat recently, claiming among other quite compelling things, "90% of Critical Microsoft Windows 7 Vulnerabilities are Mitigated by Eliminating Admin Rights"
Other interesting 'facts' they provide say that these are also mitigated by NOT running as a local admin:
100% of Microsoft Office vulnerabilities reported in 2009
94% of Internet Explorer and 100% of IE 8 vulnerabilities reported in 2009
BUT, reading the first page or so of the report I saw this line:
A vulnerability is considered mitigated by removing administrator rights if the following sentence is located in the Security Bulletin’s Mitigating Factors section, ?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.
could be sounds pretty weak to me so and I wondered how valid all this really is. I'm NOT trying to say it's not safer to run without admin rights, I think that is well known. I just wonder if these stats are something you would use as ammo in an argument, or use to sell a change like that (removing users as local admins) to business side? Thoughts?
Link to the report (pdf)
[should this supposed to be a community wiki?]
