Well, if you’re still with me, then my last article on local administrators may have motivated you to take the leap into a more secure user account. Congratulations, you will thank me later, after you see how much less spyware, viruses, and pop-ups find their way onto your computer.

There are a number of ways to “demote” yourself into a regular user account. The first method is to create a new user account that is a standard user, and use it instead of your current local administrator account. That would leave the admin account there for you to manage your computer as needed. The downside to this method is that the account you will be using on a regular basis will need to be customized from scratch, because all your settings and files will still be associated with the old account.

The method I prefer is to create another account, but this time give it the local administrative privileges. So you would go into Control Panel, and open up User Accounts. Go to New User, and create a new user. Name it something subtle, like “All-Mighty Admin.” No, seriously, go for something that doesn’t scream “hack me, I’m the account with all the power!” I suggest something like “maint,” “user1,” or maybe a pet’s name. Then give it a nice strong password.

The next step is to log into your new local administrator account, and make sure everything looks like it is working properly. Now, from that account, go to Control Panel > User Accounts again, and select your old administrator account. You can change the type from Administrator to Limited User. Why didn’t I say Power User? Well, that’s the subject of another post, but for now, just know that a Power User account has virtually the same privileges as an Administrator, including relatively easy access to elevate the account to an actual Administrator! So stick with the Limited User classification, I promise it won’t be that painful.

Then log into your newly demoted user account, and make sure everything works for you. There are some programs that have “issues” with the lack of administrative privileges, however. If you find any, please post in the comments, and I will try to assist you in getting it running properly. We will also discuss methods of temporarily running as an administrator when needed in the next part of this series.

Do you work on your computer as a local administrator?  If you are running Windows, most likely you are.  Certain other operating systems also place you in a local administrator account by default, but many alternatives to Windows are smart enough to create a regular user account for you to use by default.  Note for Windows Vista, this is slightly different.  However, since the majority of users haven’t upgraded yet, I will hold off on the Vista details until a future article, so we don’t confuse things too much.

What is a local administrator?  This is the account on your computer that has absolute power over Windows.  Anything you want to do - such as install drivers, update the system, install new programs, or manage user accounts – can be done from the local administrator account.  This account is appropriately named “Administrator” by default.

Why is this bad?  After all, it’s your computer, don’t you want to have full control over everything?  While you certainly need the local administrator account to properly manage your computer, you shouldn’t be using it for your day-to-day tasks.  Web surfing should never be done from a local administrator account.  Why?  Because any program you run as an administrator has the same level of access that you do.  So if you go to a website that has malicious code on it, that code could direct your computer to install programs, delete files, or many other equally dangerous tasks.

Convinced, but not sure if you are using a local administrator account?  There’s a number of ways to find out.  Go to the Start Menu, and click on Run.  In the window that comes up, type “cmd” (without the quotes).  In the Command Prompt window, type “net localgroup administrators” (again, without the quotes).  A list of users who are local administrators will come up, so check to see if you’re in there.  Another way to check would be to go to Control Panel, and click on User Accounts.  You should see your account there, with a word such as Administrator, Power User, or Limited User with it.

In the next part, I’ll show you how to turn your account into a regular user account, without losing all your carefully customized settings and files.

What web browser do you use?  If you’re like over 60% of the population (as of May), you probably use Internet Explorer, most likely because it comes with Windows.  There are a number of other choices out there, and they all have things to offer that IE does not.

What does this have to do with security?  Well, for starters, Windows includes Internet Explorer with the base operating system.  Because of the way the components of IE are tied to the components of Windows, Microsoft successfully argued to the antitrust courts that it was impossible to truly uninstall IE.  Sure, as a result of those antitrust proceedings you can have a different browser as your default, but IE is still there, hiding in the background.  Because of this collusion between IE and Windows, I believe IE has an easier path into the operating system in the event of a security breach.  What I mean by this is that a malicious website that exploits a vulnerability in IE is more likely to break through into Windows itself, as opposed to a similar vulnerability in a browser that is simply installed on top of the operating system.

My browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox.  There are many reasons for this.  First of all, in my experience it loads pages considerably faster, and crashes less often.  Second, it is extremely customizable.  You can load different themes to totally change the look and feel of the browser, and you can install add-on applications that perform different tasks to make the browser more useful to you.  Since you can choose which add-ons you install, your browser can become very personalized.

Again, what does this have to do with security?  A lot of these add-ons are used to enhance the security of an already reasonably secure browser.  For instance, I use an add-on to block advertisements, which can prevent certain malicious pop-ups from loading.  My favorite add-on is known as NoScript, which is an amazing tool if you can deal with how it breaks certain sites.  NoScript effectively disables all scriptable components of any website, include Javascript and ActiveX.  Without scripts, it is practically impossible to have a malicious site compromise Firefox.  Of course, many sites use these scripts to provide basic functionality – YouTube, for instance.  The point is you can pick and choose which sites you want to enable scripts on, and any other site will be script-less the first time you visit it. Play around with it, I’m sure you’ll get to enjoy the feeling of only allowing sites to run scripts that you specify.

 What’s your choice for the most secure browser?  Let me know in the comments.