From: Michal Zalewski (lcamtufcoredump.cx)
Date: Mon Feb 16 2009 - 09:28:45 CST

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> "Removing Admin Rights Stymies 92% of Microsoft's Security Vulnerabilities
> Nine of out 10 critical bugs reported by Microsoft last year could
> have been made moot, or at least made less dangerous, if people ran
> Windows without administrative rights, a developer of enterprise
> rights management software claimed Tuesday".

If you look at the vague, short, management-oriented white paper that
backs with this PR claim
(http://beyondtrust.com/documentation/whitePapers/wp_VulnerabilityReport.pdf)
- by the way, from a company that happens to make account privilege
management software - it seems that they are essentially saying two
things:

1) With 100% of client software vulnerabilities, the attacker can do a
bit less to the system if user is not running as root (duh),

2) About 92% of all vulnerabilities in Microsoft bulletins affected
client software, exclusively (MSIE, Office, etc) or not (shared
image, XML parsing libraries, etc).

The transition made in the magazine, from "attacker can do a bit less"
to "critical bugs could be made moot" seems to be a pretty fallacious
one, however.

/mz
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