Saturday, September 5, 2015

Remember the Principle of Least Privilege

Are you using the administrator account on your computer as your day-to-day login?Many people do this, and as you might have guessed it isn’t a very good idea at all. Doing so leaves your machine vulnerable to risks and exploits; should you miss something obvious (a fake pop-up informing you of viruses on your PC and insisting you download a removal tool, for instance) or visit a non-secure website, there is scope for remote scripts on that site to cause problems.
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Files might be deleted, and drives can be reformatted. A new secret administrative account might even be created without your knowledge, and used by an attacker to monitor your activity, record keystrokes (anti-keylogging tools are available), steal your data and even your identity. The ultimate malware attack.
Unless you require administrator rights for a particular task (such as installing hardware or software) make sure you’re logging into your computer with a standard user account. Don’t worry about losing the Administrator password through under-use – it can often be recovered.

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