an unidentified program wants to access your computer

[Guest]

hi ,on my vista desktop two icons one for spywareblaster and one for spybot
s&d have small shields in front of them and when i click on them i need to
give permission" an unidentified program wants to access your computer"this
only happens on these two ,i would just like them to start like the rest ,is
there a way to remove this .apart from turning off uac .many thanks john

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

John

Anytime you start a program that accesses restricted parts of the system
that effects all users, you need to give your permission for the program to
run. If you turn off UAC, any program, whether it's malicious or not, will
be allowed to run using your administrator privileges without you being
aware of it.

 

[Guest]

But surely its possible for someone at microsoft to write code to save a
secure file that lists all programs that the user universally desires to run.
I mean, how likely is it that I'm going to double click on a program that I
trust implicitly, then CHANGE MY MIND half way through loading? Surely its
probable that in 999,999,999 cases out of 1,000,000,000, that if I trust a
program once, I'll trust it the second time?
And it doesn't help to tell me to get updates for programs, when some of
these implicitly trusted programs are of a type that will never be updated.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:00:03 -0700, atimholt

But surely its possible for someone at microsoft to write code to save a
secure file that lists all programs that the user universally desires to run.

That's more or less what they do to define Safe Mode and firewall
functionalities - and malware regularly edits these things.

So no, I don't want that, tho that is not the only reason.

I mean, how likely is it that I'm going to double click on a program that I
trust implicitly, then CHANGE MY MIND half way through loading?

Not very. However, it is very likely that malware may automate the
launch (and parameters) of some program, and if UAC didn't pop up to
warn you, you would not know it was happening.

Do I "trust implicitly" a particular program? Maybe.

Do I "trust implicitly" that program, for all possible parameters as
passed via CLI or other methods? No way!

probable that in 999,999,999 cases out of 1,000,000,000, that if I trust a
program once, I'll trust it the second time?

You're missing it. It's not about the program, it is about why it is
running and what it is doing (or being automated to do).

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