Vista - User Account Control - Microsoft Warns You Are On Your Own
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A few days ago, I did a article about User Account Control [UAC], in which I described that some users who are new to computing may have trouble knowing what to do when the UAC warning appears on their Vista systems. See story here. And it seems that Microsoft concedes that UAC is not a security protection and that your ctions could put you at risk.
The article states:
“Think carefully when you see a UAC prompt – make sure you know what action is about to be performed. If you are not sure, it’s safest to click ‘Cancel’ and double check. It’s very important to remember that UAC prompts are not a security boundary – they don’t offer direct protection. They do offer you a chance to verify an action before it happens.Once you allow an action to proceed, there may be no easy way back. Windows Vista provides many features to protect your system, but they require proper use. Your system security is only as strong as your actions, so think before you click.”
And though this might give the user a warm fuzzy feeling, it does little for the user if they accidentally click on the wrong answer. Is UAC better than nothing? I think so. But it may provide a false sense of trust for new users.
Note: This document was provided in Word format, but knowing that not everyone has Word on their system, I used Google to provide a html format so everyone could view it.
Some guidelines for securing your Windows Vista PC
Comments welcome.
[tags]vista, microsoft, warning, uac, [/tags]
9 Comments
Tim Hodkinson
February 24th, 2007
at 8:29pm
“Your system security is only as strong as your actions, so think before you click.”
I don’t think anyone has to worry about Microsoft taking over the PC security industry anytime soon. Who would ever recommend a security method that relied on the judgement of the average desktop user? Most of us wouldn’t even recognize malicious activity. In fact, I’ll bet most users would probably consider the constant prompts from UAC to be malicious activity and want to get rid of it instead.
I think Windows should just stick to the being the OS and leave the rest to third-party developers. I was reading about VMware and it sounds like MS wants to get them just like they did Netscape.
On the other hand, all this Vista intrigue makes for interesting news. I don’t think anyone can really say at this point how all these Vista innovations (Eula, Defender, DRM…) are going to work out. But having the majority of Windows computers running with poor or no security will be such a problem for everyone that it could be thing that forces the Government to rearrange MS and open up more of the Windows code to 3rd parties for no other reason than we can no longer rely on MS to “govern” the majority of the world’s computers.
Ron Schenone
February 24th, 2007
at 8:53pm
Hello Tim,
Unfortunately I have to agree with you. I thought Vista would really provide better security, but as each day goes by, it is being picked apart. To bad, after 5 years of development, we all expected a better product.
To add to the insult, there are people who are actually formatting their drives to get rid of Vista, and are installing XP.
We haven’t seen this since MS dumped ME on unsuspecting users for about six months and the best fix was to take off ME and install 98.
It should be interesting to see what happens.
Thanks for the comments, Ron
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