In positioning itself to provide aftermarket applications for Microsoft's Vista operating system, anti-virus market leader Symantec is highlighting some shortcomings it believes to exist in the new platform's own security tools.
Among the conclusions of a presentation delivered to the media during the week of Jan. 8 by Symantec Vice President of Engineering Rowan Trollope is the software maker's finding that the UAC (User Account Control) feature of Vista, a security innovation highly touted by Microsoft, remains unwieldy and confusing to users.
UAC is designed to help Vista limit malware's ability to escalate an individual PC's user privileges, a common technique used by code writers to spread their viruses from one machine to another.
Integrated with Vista's other onboard security technologies, the system is set to prompt users whenever a program attempts to change its status on their machines, thereby lowering the chances of hidden threats to operate on PCs running the OS.
News source: eWeek for Full Article
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