WINDOWS VISTA™ SECURITY: Securing Vista Against Malicious Attacks

Chapter 4. User Account Control

User Account Control (UAC) is probably one of the most visible, and most talked about, security features in Windows Vista. Whenever you attempt to take an action that only administrators can perform you get a dialog box asking whether you really want to do this, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Despite the visibility of, and all the opinions about, UAC, we do not believe that most of the discussion is carried out in light of what UAC really is. In fact, there seems to be some real confusion out there. It is very clear that many pundits have not bothered to fully understand UAC, what it is, and how it works. They write blog posts, newsgroup postings, and articles with titles like "Vista's most annoying feature" and they pontificate on how many people will turn it off, and why it is so annoying in the first place.

Unfortunately, much of the advice to turn off UAC is based on an initial experience. You should expect that, while you are configuring your computer, you will have a very different administrative experience than you will have once the computer is in a steady state. The first few weeks will be quite different from the following few weeks.

Introduction

UAC is Microsoft's long-awaited solution to the problem that 90+ percent of end users on the Windows platform run with administrative privileges. That means that malware that attacks the users themselves, or the applications they run, will have the run of the computer on 90 + percent of the systems they see. ...