Have you ever attempted to, say, modify a file or folder on a computer, and been blocked from doing so because you don’t have administrator rights? If so, you can be rest-assured that your company’s IT team is doing its job to protect the assets of your computer’s infrastructure.

Whereas an administrator is a local account or security group possessing unrestricted access to create, delete and modify files, folders and settings on a specific computer, other accounts lacking these rights will only be granted certain permissions and levels of access. These permissions are called administrator rights and are assigned by administrators to users to enable them to make changes.

An administrator account is ideally tasked with performing system-wide changes to a computer, from creating or deleting user accounts to changing others’ account passwords, names and the such. Bottom line: If you don’t know the administrator password to your computer, you will not have any way of modifying files and settings, installing programs, or fixing issues.

Unfortunately, in every organization, there are dangerous, and somewhat hidden, loopholes to managing these administrator rights. These threats, which can cause some serious security compromises, can come from both insiders and outsiders that take advantage of vulnerabilities in systems. Unfortunately, while IT teams will do everything it takes to maintain defenses 100 percent of the time, all it takes is one intruder to find a single opening or loophole in the system to be successful.

One of these keyholes can be a matter of local administrator accounts being created unbeknownst to the IT manager. These hidden accounts can have far-reaching implications, as they can be used by malware to install malicious software on local computers. With this loophole in existence, these dangerous accounts can further penetrate into the IT environment and propagate a breeding ground for security breaches and risks.

So, how exactly can IT security and operations managers mitigate this risk? What signs can they look for and what approaches can they take to ensure these loopholes never occur? In order to spread the word on best practices for managing these keyholes, TMC (News - Alert), along with Viewfinity, will host a webinar entitled “Using Group Policy to Manage Administrator Rights” on Tuesday, March 13, 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST. Attendees will learn more about how Viewfinity leverages Group Policy to elevate privileges for standard users, as well as how to block applications and toolbars, and custom configure security messages to end users.

For more information or to register, click here!