RE: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods

["Jason Albuquerque" <JAlbuquerque () northkingstown org>]

I can honestly say that all of our users are "Restricted Users" on our
XP Pro and W2K Pro Workstations, and none have fallen victim to malware
or spyware. 
Now yes, this could create more work, because users will not be able to
install any software or patches on the PC, but with the implementation
of management tools such as SUS or SMS (to push patches) and an Remote
control software such as VNC your PC workload will actually go down.
You will not have to worry about Spyware/Malware being installed, your
Windows Updates will be pushed automatically, and if a new piece of
software needs to be installed you can get to the Machine remotely
switch the User to an admin, drop the user back down to "restricted
user" and you are done.



Jason Albuquerque

GIS Manager

Department of Information Systems

80 Boston Neck Road

Town of North Kingstown, RI 02852

Tel. (401) 268-1516

Fax (401) 295-2594

www.northkingstown.org

love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth 
C13:6 

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Krough [mailto:ckrough () vet upenn edu] 
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 3:07 PM
Cc: incidents () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: IE Malware / Spyware Control Methods

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