Surfing with an Admin account or How to Get Owned

Martin McKeay over at mckeay.net is has good methods of securing his home network:

I'm a strong believer in the 'rule of least privileges' as my wife and children well know; at least once a week I get called over to the kids computer to log in as administrator and install some program for them. The kids have gotten used to it, but my wife hasn't and she's forgotten that I gave her the adminstrator password.

The reason it is a great idea to use the least priveleges possible and not go surfing the net with Admin priviledges is that if you (or anyone on your computer with admin priviledges) hit an exploit site that downloads something on your system, it will do so with your administrator permissions. 

It is best to surf the web with an account that does not have permission to download anything from the web, with elevated security features on Internet Explorer (cookies and java scripts turned off).  In fact, just use and patched version of Firefox. 

More Security on Internet Explorer

You can increase security feature of IE by going to Tools | Internet Options | Security tab.  Adjust the trust you have for the Internet by adjusting the level on the slider in the “Security Level for this Zone Area.” 

If you surf the web with an administrator account without a firewall not only will you more than likely get hit with a trojan and worms you will give the masters of these products elevated priviledges to your system as they will install code in the C:\Windows\System32 – also known as root. From root a criminal hacker can do practically anything they want with your computer (including install a keylogger that copies everything you type and send the data back to some IRC room on the Internet.)

In layman's terms, they will OWN your ass.  

If your really paranoid: 

Customize your selected security levels by clicking the “Custom Level” button inthe “Security Level for this Zone Area.”  Disable Active X, and Java to completely destroy the ability of malicious mobile code to affect Internet Explorer (unless its already on your system).  This will impare your ability to expirience anything beyond text.