And someone please explain to me why the SYSTEM ADMIN was checking his email with the ADMIN account on a SECURE MACHINE. Then running an unknown program as ADMIN user!
This is the heart of the matter, and I think that
some design aspects of NT are to blame. You really asked two questions here. First I'll
speculate at why someone was running as admin.
It
is remarkably hard to do anything if you are not admin.
Unlike *nix users, you can't easily have a "root" terminal window open while your X-console session is under an ordinary user. Being logged
in as admin is an all or nothing thing.
If you had to log out and log back in every time
you need to do anything that requires access, you would run as admin all the time too. At least after the first week of doing that.
Now why run an untrusted program? Again, there
are things about the design of NT that encourage
that.
content-type is very tightly linked to file
names.
file name extensions are typically concealed
Users on any system could make such a mistake, but
those two things make it much more likely that
an NT users will make the mistake of running an
untrusted program.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the heart of the matter, and I think that some design aspects of NT are to blame. You really asked two questions here. First I'll speculate at why someone was running as admin.
If you had to log out and log back in every time you need to do anything that requires access, you would run as admin all the time too. At least after the first week of doing that.
Now why run an untrusted program? Again, there are things about the design of NT that encourage that.
- content-type is very tightly linked to file
names.
- file name extensions are typically concealed
Users on any system could make such a mistake, but those two things make it much more likely that an NT users will make the mistake of running an untrusted program.