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By hayami.wai, January 9, 2007 1:01 pm

What is User Account Control?
User Account Control or UAC is a new security feature in Windows Vista that aims to prevent malicious processes or attacks to be execute unknowingly on the computer. For short, it is a preventive mechanism to prevent malwares from doing anything funny.

How UAC works?
UAC works by restricting the priviledge of the administrator accounts, effectively running the accounts in standard user mode (Isn’t this great? Because now sysadmins are really just normal human being). When task or applications requires administrator priviledge to execute, UAC will prompt the user for permission to elevate the priviledge of the task or application to administrator (where you will notice your screen just went dark with a message box prompting “Windows need your permission to continue”. Alternatively, the user can initiate the task or application to run with administrator priviledge by using the “Run as Administrator” function.

Why UAC?
Malware (virus, spyware) often requires administrator or system privileges to run as they need to access system resources. While most administrators (including home users) like to run with full administrator priviledge accounts for convinience sake, malwares are happier than the admins as they can execute with administrator privileges without the intervention of the users. Thus with the implementation of UAC, admins are in a way forced to work in “protected admin” mode.

Does UAC really works?
For the sysadmins, maybe, but I believe that most of them will turn it off. For home users, unlikely. Considering that normal users will see the text on the message box as “Do you wish to get rid of this nagging message box?” and they will click yes anyway.

Disabling UAC (“Stop asking me for permission, just do it” mode)
Method One

1. Click Start then Run and type secpol.msc then OK.
2. Go to Local Policies > Security Option > User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode
3. Select Elevate without prompting
4. Click OK and close the Local Security Policy window.

Method Two

1. Go to Control Panel
2. Select User Accounts and Famil Safety then User Accounts
3. Select your user account
4. Click on Turn User Account Control on or off
5. Uncheck Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer, then click OK

However, if your computer is in a domain environment, and if UAC had been enforced in the Group Policy, there is really nothing much you can do to stop the nagging.

Note: By disabling UAC, you are effectively running a full administrator account similarly to the pre-Vista era and may put your computer at higher risk. And so viola, malwares loves you again.

Updated April 16, 2007

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By hayami.wai, December 30, 2006 2:26 am

Just as Microsoft is fixing up the previous RTM cracks (frankenbuild & KMS crack), hackers managed to get one more crack again. This time by modifying the count down timer.

*no guide will be provided as I have no wish to have this as a cracking/hacking website.