BTW, I like where your response was coming from. It is the same tact I took. We will make it work the way the users need it to without them having admin rights. And then I delivered on that promise.
From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org] Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 9:48 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: This is what I get.... +1 After this reply to my coworker, I started working on exactly this. Since we are basically a SaaS shop, our exec's have a habit of focusing only on client-side IT issues/development and employee-facing IT is scarcely on any C-level's radar. I am also guessing this is not unusual for this type of company... Dave From: Ken Schaefer [mailto:k...@adopenstatic.com]<mailto:[mailto:k...@adopenstatic.com]> Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 7:43 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: This is what I get.... IMHO this is just wasting your time, and could potentially backfire. Write a business case instead, backed by actual figures/facts, and it needs to go up the chain to management. Making major changes to how a business works is not the job of IT (except in the smallest of organisations), and IT trying to enforce something like this just makes IT a target for end-user frustration. It will make your job harder in future. Instead, business operations really is the job of the COO (or CIO, or even the business enterprise architect - if you have one). Get them to make an informed decision, and enforce it down the chain of management. That's what they are paid to do. Cheers Ken From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org]<mailto:[mailto:david....@nwea.org]> Sent: Wednesday, 19 September 2012 12:47 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: This is what I get.... After I cooled off, I gave him this reply: Clearly you've never tried to not make them local admins. Give me two of where a typical employee (this mean not developers) , and I'll give you two examples of how it can be accomplished WITHOUT them being local admin... From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com]<mailto:[mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com]> Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 7:30 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: This is what I get.... Are those calls documented? And what was the nature of the call? After the initial transition, this will actually make admin's lives easier, since they have a more controlled environment to work in. Yeah, some things are easier when they have admin rights, but that doesn't mean that users should be doing those things, either. On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 10:22 AM, David Lum <david....@nwea.org<mailto:david....@nwea.org>> wrote: Here's how much fight I get when I even SUGGEST we should be removing admin right from our users. Worthy to note I am not a local admin on my own NWEA machine, and none of my %sidejob% clients are local admins on theirs. This guy knows this, but still fights me every time. This reply incensed me enough to start again working on the management buy-in, as it's a lot harder to stop a top down order. Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 6:35 AM To: David Lum Subject: RE: IE 0-day, MS releases bulletin We have this very rare instance of a Zero Day attack in IE for a few sites and you think that is a reason to create the complete nightmare of taking away Admin rights to a local machine. Clearly you don't know how often our users are using their admin rights on their machines. The SD got a call once a week from the ONE person who had that setup when she was moved to Windows 7. If we spent some time building the infrastructure that makes such a situation workable (like I did at the school district I worked at), then we could live with our 500 users not being admins. David Grand From: David Lum Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 6:24 AM Subject: IE 0-day, MS releases bulletin Please read this article and weigh in on the suggested workarounds. Microsoft has released a bulletin on this, and has suggested workarounds. Most can be achieved via GPO: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2757760 Note 1: "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights." SD - this exact scenario is the benefit of users not being local administrators. Note 2: Some of this is already done via the Trusted Site GPO. Their additional recommendations recommend disabling ActiveX for Internet and Local Intranet. The latter would disable some Commons functionality, but we can disable it on the Internet site zone temporarily. Even this will generate Service Desk calls but I feel this is worth mitigating the risk. Dave From: David Lum Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 12:39 PM Subject: Just so you know that I know.. 0-day of the week: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231367/Hackers_exploit_new_IE_zero_day_vulnerability?source=rss_latest_content&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fnews%2Ffeed+%28Latest+from+Computerworld%29 Dave ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
