This article is more than 1 year old

LG monitor software quietly kills UAC, dev says

Life's Good for malware

German developer Christopher Bachner has alleged LG monitor software is quietly disabling User Account Control (UAC), putting Windows punters at risk of malware infection.

Introduced with Windows Vista and available on higher Microsoft platforms, UAC boosts security by restricting applications to standard user privileges unless administrators clicked OK.

In the words of Microsoft it "makes it so that even if you're using an administrator account, changes cannot be made to your computer without you knowing about it, which can help prevent malware and spyware from being installed on or making changes to your computer".

Bachner says that protection has been quietly binned by LG's monitor software in a bid to make the user experience smoother.

"This is not only lazy, but also extremely dangerous, since applications that should never run with admin privileges were executed with admin privileges. For example, my browser was running each time with full admin rights," Bachner says.

"This result was very surprising and raised some anger in me because I would have expected more from such a large company.

"The only solution to this is to uninstall the software and enable UAC again."

LG and Microsoft have been contacted for comment.

The killing of UAC affects home users most. System administrators have other ways to restricting user admin access because, the Windows authorisation prompt can be the last step in preventing malware from running.

But those at-risk non-tech users would likely miss the news, making them even riper targets for malware writers. ®

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