Software engineers who attend Microsoft's annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference later this month could get their first taste of a new Windows user permissions model that could change the way thousands of programs are developed and run. But as the company prepares for the final Longhorn development push, questions remain about its plans for a new user privileges model called Least-Privilege User Account, or LUA.
Network administrators enforce strict user privileges on networks and restrict access to servers and other resources, but individual Windows users often log on to their Windows system as a local administrator because of the difficulty of running even common programs with just user permissions. Authors of viruses, worms, bots, and spyware take advantage of those elevated privileges to install malicious programs and change the configuration of Windows to keep their creations from being detected, shut down, or removed, experts say.
News source: PCWorld.com
