Security Incidents mailing list archives
Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods
From: Chris Krough <ckrough () vet upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:06:56 -0500
Following the concept of least privilege is very effective at preventing spyware installation. We've reduced the access level of most of our users to 'Domain User'. For users who require frequent administrative access we provide them with a secondary, preferably local only, administrative account. For users with occasional administrative needs we either upgrade their account temporarily or just perform the installation/changes ourselves. This practice has almost completely eliminated spyware problems from our network.
Depending on your users needs there is a good chance that lowering default account privileges will increase the load on your support staff. Installations and low-level configuration changes will require attention from someone with administrative privileges but the time saved over handling spyware/virus incidents is greater.
Have you upgraded your clients to XP SP2? Illuminatus Master wrote:
Hello List, I'm sure you all realize the growing threat of malware and spyware to Internet Explorer. It has been my experience that the initial infection and/or removel of an infection by anti-spyware products can permanently damage a windows workstation. This damage occurs in many forms and often leads too the workstation being reformatted and rebuilt before going back into service. A recent example is earlier this week, in spite of content filtering, a workstation was infected with "wintools", "mysearchtoolbar" etc. The tough part of this is that such malware has multiple instances/threads and renames system files like msconfig to resist removal. Often IE/Windows is so damaged it's more time effiecient to just replace the box and rebuild the infected one. My question is this, I'm batting around the idea of using Group Policy in our Active Directory to try and choke IE down to the point where such Malware has trouble installing itself. Has anyone here ever tried such as this with any degree of success? Other than Group Policy I'm also considering deploying an alternate web browser that isnt subject to malware infection but doing so complicates my patching/reporting routine for our security audits. I look forward to your comments and idea's. Thanks, massa
Current thread:
- IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Illuminatus Master (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Gary Baribault (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods harley mcdonald (Jan 07)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods George M. Garner Jr. (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Valdis . Kletnieks (Jan 10)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Chris Krough (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Harlan Carvey (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Valdis . Kletnieks (Jan 10)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Paul Laudanski (Jan 10)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Paris E. Stone (Jan 07)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Jose Nazario (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Saad Kadhi (Jan 10)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods M. Shirk (Jan 10)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Jeff Bryner (Jan 11)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Bernie Cosell (Jan 12)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Orlando Richards (Jan 12)
- RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Jose Nazario (Jan 07)
- Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods Gary Baribault (Jan 07)