Browsing the Web and Reading E-mail Safely as an Administrator

I'm not sure if I know too many people who haven't been infected by malware or spyware at one point or another, while surfing the internet.

It's a fact that if you have a Windows NT based computer (like windows XP or 2000) that one of the best things you can do is create a regular user account that doesn't have administrative rights. Who wants to log off or switch users just to install an update or a piece of software, especially when you have all sorts of programs running in one user account and it takes nearly 5 minutes to switch users in XP because of running programs? Here's a solution.

Since a common way of getting spyware installed on your system is by browsing the Web, especially using Internet Explorer because of ActiveX, I've come across a small utility called Drop My Rights. What this software does is allow you to run a program without having the same rights as you do while being logged on as an administrator. Basically, if you're logged on as an administrator you can go into a command prompt, type DropMyRights.exe N C:program filesinternet exploreriexplorer.exe and it will run Internet Explorer with different user abilities, so instead of running Internet Explorer as an administrator you could run it as a regular user which will keep you safer from installing stuff you really don't want. You can take a better look at it here..

MSDN Security Center

If you have any questions feel free to post in the forums!

Hope you find this helpful!

Partie™

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