New Report Shows 100% of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities can be Mitigated by Eliminating Admin Rights

BeyondTrust, the leading provider of privilege delegation and authorization management, today published research findings that found the removal of administrator rights from Windows users is a mitigating factor in 75 percent of Critical Windows 7 vulnerabilities. The results demonstrate that as companies migrate to Windows 7 they’ll need to implement a desktop Privileged Identity Management solution, to reduce the risks from unpatched Microsoft vulnerabilities without inhibiting their users’ ability to operative effectively.

Key findings from this report show that removing administrator rights will better protect companies against the exploitation of:

• 75% of Critical Windows 7 vulnerabilities reported by Microsoft to date
• 100% of Microsoft Office vulnerabilities reported in 2010
• 100% of Internet Explorer and 100% of IE 8 vulnerabilities reported in 2010
• 64% of all Microsoft vulnerabilities reported in 2010

“Microsoft identified 256 vulnerabilities in 2010,” said Peter Beauregard, director of program management for BeyondTrust. “Microsoft does a great job identifying and patching those vulnerabilities, but the pure number demonstrates the volume of vulnerabilities in some of the most common business software in the enterprise. Patching alone doesn’t protect the enterprise, because so many vulnerabilities are undiscovered and others could take weeks to patch. Removing administrative privileges from users is the only way to eliminate the vast majority of risk that comes from these vulnerabilities.”

BeyondTrust’s new report examines all vulnerabilities published in Microsoft’s 2010 Security Bulletins, as well as all of the published Windows 7 vulnerabilities to date to quantify the effectiveness of removing administrator rights for mitigating Microsoft vulnerabilities. The report shows that the vast majority of vulnerabilities share the same best practice advice in the “Mitigating Factors” portion of Microsoft’s security bulletins: “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.” Complete findings and methodology can be found online in the report.

BeyondTrust 2010 Microsoft Vulnerability report is accessible at the following link: http://www.beyondtrust.com/whitepapers/BeyondTrust2010-Microsoft-Vulnerability-analysis.aspx

About BeyondTrust

Founded in 1985, BeyondTrust is the global leader in privilege authorization management, access control and security solutions for virtualization and cloud computing environments. BeyondTrust empowers IT governance to strengthen security, improve productivity, drive compliance and reduce expense. The company’s products eliminate the risk of intentional, accidental and indirect misuse of privileges on desktops and servers in heterogeneous IT systems. More than half of the companies listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rely on BeyondTrust’s PowerBroker suite of products to secure their enterprises.

Five of the top ten commercial banks and two of America’s largest private companies have adopted PowerBroker to secure guest operating systems and ESX hypervisors in a virtualized environment. For more information, visit www.beyondtrust.com.

BeyondTrust, the BeyondTrust logo and PowerBroker are trademarks or registered trademarks, in the United States and certain other countries of BeyondTrust Software. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged.