MrKernel Network

There are three ways I manage my systems, MMC (Microsoft Managment Console), RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), and telnet/ssh (Um, please tell me you at least know what one of them is).

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Since last two years over 90% of my workstation support calls out side of my office were in regards to Adware/Spyware. If I were to ask the people what they thought the biggest problem with Adware/Spyware they would probably say, “It slows down my computer, makes popups, and makes my computer behave funny”. None of them would say, “They might be stealing sensitive information off of my computer”. This is beacuse the Adware/Spyware basicly took over the computer. So, as people got “smarter” they put on Adware/Spyware scanners, assuming that they were all legit, all this did was bog down there computer. Note how I said, “90% of my workstation support calls out side of my office“. We run all our users as normal users, no local power users, or local admin users. Also, all domain/server admin are normal domain users. We elevate our privliges with a second logon. This has elimanated 99% of our Adware/Spyware problems. It has also helped againts Zero day virii. We had a Zero day virus that came in through e-mail. One person received it from one of our general email boxes and opened it, it didn’t open so she just forwarded it to the department it was intended for. It was sent to a few different people and none of them could open the attachment, so they sent it to IT. One of the other tech received it, and he said, “This looks like a virus!”. We tried it out in our test lab and sure enough it was. None of the staff computers were infected, because they did not have enough permissions to run the virus. Also note, 4 hours later our Virus Scaner received the signature for the virus. Now I am not saying that aproprate permissions is the end all be all, but IT IS the way Microsoft products were indended to run. Alot of Micosoft “insecureaties” are wrongfully blamed on Microsoft, when it was a permission setup issue. My next artical will be about administration methods of Microsoft networks.