- Jun 23, 2017
- 183
Should students get administrator privileges on their borrowed laptops (that they have borrowed from the school for the duration of their time at that school)? With students, I mean people studying in high school or higher.
Many students think that they should be given admin privileges, while the IT department doesn't always agree.
Pros:
Counterarguments to the cons:
Many students think that they should be given admin privileges, while the IT department doesn't always agree.
Pros:
- Students don't need to bring their laptops to the IT department to fix simple things requiring admin privileges, which is good both for the student and the support department
- Students can download software and change settings should they need to - which is especially important if it's needed for school work/to fix a problem affecting school work, and the IT department is closed
- No one but the student uses his/her computer - so if it gets infected, it will probably only affect him/her (unless it spreads across the network)
- The IT department doesn't need to spend time detecting people who use privilege escalation exploits to become admin (which is fairly common among students, at least where I live)
- Increased malware risk
- The risk of malware spreading across the school network probably increases
- Problems on the computers can be harder to fix by the IT department as the user can screw up the computer worse with admin
- Technically skilled people can circumvent Group Policies as long as they have access to the whole registry
- The IT department can deploy needed applications
- Becoming admin through privilege escalation is complicated (and prohibited), which causes most people to avoid it
Counterarguments to the cons:
- Unsigned apps can be blocked from being elevated to greatly reduce the security risk
- The "Run anyway" button in Windows SmartScreen can be disabled to prevent users from running unknown applications downloaded from the Internet
- If the support department can't fix a problem within a reasonable time, the computer can be re-imaged, which shouldn't take a very long time. As documents are saved in the cloud (at least in my school), nothing important should be lost
- GPO's can be circumvented even when the IT department hasn't given users admin privileges, although it requires more steps
- Not all malware needs administrator privileges to run
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