Best Practices

• Best practices for UAC can be summed up quite simply as follows:

  • Good: Run in admin-approval mode

  • Better: Run as standard user and elevate to a separate admin account

  • Best: Run as standard user and switch user to a separate admin account

• Don't trust the vendor when they say their app must run as an administrator! One of the most visible, and egregious examples of where this is not true is in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. When you launch Visual Studio, it tells you that you should run it as an administrator. This is only true for some developers that need to perform certain tasks. More information is available at http://www.msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa972193.aspx.

• Make sure that all your information workers, and everyone in your family run with UAC turned on, as standard users if at all possible

• Give Microsoft feedback on how to improve UAC in the future using whichever feedback mechanisms are available to you. UAC is arguably the most important strategic security feature in Windows Vista. If we are ever to get away from the situation where everyone runs as an administrator all the time we must help make UAC work.

• Complain to third-party vendors whose applications do not run properly under UAC. The only way those vendors will mend their evil ways is if people stop buying their products until they work properly. Check on http://www.threatcode.com before you spend money on software and nominate software you find that is broken and is not yet on the Web site.

• Do not believe that UAC will protect you from malicious code. It is not designed to provide proper process isolation between processes on the same desktop.