Musings of a sysadmin
Applications requiring admin rights
As you know I have been tightening up security at work by finding out who has admin rights and removing it. I must say that i am quite shocked at the amount of apps that assume users have local admin rights.
Even things like scanner drivers are affected especially when they are called from other large corporate applications (think of a company who makes pdf reading software and also photo editing software). So the next couple of days will be spent running round figuring out which reg keys and folders users need higher access too. All fun stuff.
I am also working on a post about speed screen and am again thinking about making a few video tutorials.
Hi Dale,
If you’re interested in removing admin rights from your users but you have some apps that don’t run well without admin rights you might be interested in my current employer’s solution, Privilege Guard. It lets you assign admin rights to specific applications rather than a whole user account, and is designed to solve exactly the problem you are facing.
Before I started working for Avecto I found myself in a number of similar situations where I had to look after badly behaving apps but also desired to remove admin rights from my users. I ended up messing around with registry and file permissions and doing all sorts of other gross hacks. If I’d known at the time about Privilege Guard, it would have saved me many tens of hours of effort (and probably a few hairs too!).
I hope you don’t think this is spam, and I apologise if you do: however I thought Privilege Guard might be genuinely useful for you. Let me know if you’d like to see a demo or if you’d like an evaluation copy.
Cheers,
James
james.young@avecto.com