Having attended Infosec and presented their this year on VDI Security and Whitelisting and hearing the noises made pre and post Microsoft TechEd, it has become clear that application whitelisting is a key technology. Not just because traditional signature-based anti-malware has been losing effectiveness, but also due to a not yet widely recognised problem with standard user deployment.
User Account Control (UAC) is forcing developers to change their applications. Because of UAC, users can be prompted before installing applications and more organisations are making the choice to deploy the desktops they manage in standard user mode. And unsurprisingly, independent software vendors (ISVs) are now releasing applications that don’t require administrative privileges.
At his session “Applocker: Your Solution for True Application Smackdown,” Microsoft’s Jeremy Moskowitz put it this way: “If you want to make the CIO sit up and take notice, demonstrate installing Google Chrome on a PC without admin privileges.”
Application whitelisting has been around for awhile from vendors such as Syamntec and McAfee. Microsoft’s release of AppLocker with Windows 7 further validates the need for this market category.