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Understanding UAC prompt/ alert usefulness
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<blockquote data-quote="MacDefender" data-source="post: 967725" data-attributes="member: 83059"><p>Windows admin accounts have some extra powers that SUAs don’t have, a lot of them are for backwards compatibility reasons and don’t trigger UAC elevation prompts. About a year ago there was a way to defeat ransomware protected folders by creating DOS drive letters and then using a UNC URI to access them, which wouldn’t correctly be shown to an AV engine as an access to your documents. That was something that an admin account can do regardless of UAC levels but a SUA could not. </p><p></p><p>Personally I don’t think UAC MAX is a good protection mechanism for doing highly untrusted things like you mentioned. Zero day exploits against system services are becoming more and more prevalent and if you truly are operating on content that you cannot trust, I would recommend taking similar precautions as what our members here do for the Malware Hub where they are detonating malware (virtual machine or similar containment and perhaps even something on the host side to monitor for unexpected changes)</p><p></p><p>Higher UAC levels can come close to the benefits of a SUA but I find the higher UAC levels to be pretty disruptive for daily usage.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MacDefender, post: 967725, member: 83059"] Windows admin accounts have some extra powers that SUAs don’t have, a lot of them are for backwards compatibility reasons and don’t trigger UAC elevation prompts. About a year ago there was a way to defeat ransomware protected folders by creating DOS drive letters and then using a UNC URI to access them, which wouldn’t correctly be shown to an AV engine as an access to your documents. That was something that an admin account can do regardless of UAC levels but a SUA could not. Personally I don’t think UAC MAX is a good protection mechanism for doing highly untrusted things like you mentioned. Zero day exploits against system services are becoming more and more prevalent and if you truly are operating on content that you cannot trust, I would recommend taking similar precautions as what our members here do for the Malware Hub where they are detonating malware (virtual machine or similar containment and perhaps even something on the host side to monitor for unexpected changes) Higher UAC levels can come close to the benefits of a SUA but I find the higher UAC levels to be pretty disruptive for daily usage. [/QUOTE]
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