Microsoft Australia has defended the company"s User Account Control (UAC) system as being "misunderstood" and said it should be the type of technology that all operating systems aspire towards.
"There has been a lot of misunderstanding in the market around User Account Control (UAC). If you look at it from an architectural direction User Account Control is a great idea and strategically a direction that all operating systems and all technologies should be heading down," Peter Watson, Microsoft Australia"s chief security advisor said.
UAC is a security feature introduced with Microsoft"s Windows Vista operating system. The aim is to provide increased security when using Windows as a standard user by informing them when possible security breaches could be undertaken. The technology has been a source of irritation for Vista users, with Apple going as far as to make fun of UAC in a recent commercial.
As Vista and the latest edition of Office were developed with Microsoft"s Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL), "the number of exploits has been extremely low", he added.