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Sudo for Windows?

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mwb1100:
Any ideas on the best antivirus/firewall setup for this scenario?
-JennyB (January 23, 2007, 08:38 AM)
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I don't know about the best, but here's the little bit I do know:

 - I don't run a high-power firewall; I use the WinXP firewall and depend on a NAT router to keep attacks from the Internet anyway from my machine.  I suppose that this leaves me open to software 'phoning home', but right now I'm not too worried about that.  I found that 3rd party outbound firewalls were always asking me questions that I had no idea what the right answer was to and required far too much maintenance than I was willing to deal with.

 - F-Prot did not run well for me as non-admin out of the box, but a tweak to the permissions for the registry keys it wanted to write to solved that problem.

I've heard the Norton AV runs OK in non-admin, except for Live Update which only works from an admin logon (that was a while ago - they may have fixed that by now).

Many people believe that if you run as non-admin then having a real-time AV check isn't needed and simply running an explicit AV check periodically is sufficient - I've heard good things about ClamAV/ClamWin for this.

f0dder:
Many people believe that if you run as non-admin then having a real-time AV check isn't needed and simply running an explicit AV check periodically is sufficient - I've heard good things about ClamAV/ClamWin for this.
-mwb1100
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That's wrong, though - unfortunately there's been a few ways to elevate from user->admin from time to time, and I'd be surprised if there aren't a few holes left on XP... and holes to be found on Vista.

mwb1100:
That's wrong, though - unfortunately there's been a few ways to elevate from user->admin from time to time, and I'd be surprised if there aren't a few holes left on XP... and holes to be found on Vista.
-f0dder (January 24, 2007, 05:14 PM)
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Then again, the same can be said about exploits that get past AV programs - they crop up every now and again.  I think it boils down to diminishing returns - some users believe that adding the costs and potential problems of those programs to a system running in non-admin mode isn't justified by whatever additional protection is provided.

f0dder:
Keep in mind that some security holes exist in the OS for years before they're (publicly!) found, and some exist for quite a long time before they're fixed. An exploit in an AV program is going to be fixed ASAP.

Iirc it doesn't take anything more than the "at" service being enabled to elevate user privileges.

nontroppo:
Did anyone try sudowin in the end? Their documentation is excellent and this looks to be just the right balance between lock-down and liberty.

http://www.lostcreations.com/sudowin/about
http://www.lostcreations.com/sudowin/documentation

See also: http://sudown.sourceforge.net/index.php

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