Running as a local admin...DON'T!!

I have been reading Jespers blog today (Microsoft evangelist), and I must say how interesting the whole issue of outbound firewalls is (http://blogs.technet.com/jesper_johansson/ Monday May 1st post).
I have always thought the value of an outbound firewall is negligable, after all, most people just keep hitting 'accept' when any product prompts for a decision to be made regarding an outbound connectioon.
Added to this, once your computer is infected, then really things have gone too far already. The malware will be wrecking havoc with your machine.

One of the most important point is that if you run as a local Administrator, then any code that gets downloaded whilst you are innocently surfing, will run as the local admin too, and you know what that means don't you...you don't?? Well it means the malware can disable your firewall or 'swiss cheese it' so it is useless.

The firewall in Vista appears to be managed similarly with IPsec, which is good as they are trying to achieve very similar results. The local admin issue is one that deserves more attention.

I have to say, I have been guilty of surfing the 'Net logged on as a local admin. Unfortunately whilst my wife was on a reputable marathon running site, a variant of Cool Web Search infected our laptop.
This made me realise how stupid I had been by using an admin account to perform information worker tasks.

The thing is we all know how inconvenient it is to have to keep logging on as an admin to install software, even using 'Runas' adds additional complexity that many people could do without!

That was 6 months ago, and I am pleased to say that ever since then, I have run as a normal user, along with my wife and her family who also have accounts. Once all our software has been loaded with the admin account, I have been pleasantly suprised by how smoothly everything has worked..AND NO SPYWARE.
In fact I am consistently getting pop ups when we surf the 'Net, saying we do not have sufficient privileges to install software...just from browsing! Every time this happens it reminds me of another escape from malware.

We all know its't the right thing to do, try it today. Set up a normal user account, you may be suprised how everything works without problem and you can rest assured that malware will have a lot harder job to infect your computer.