Symantec Developing Windows Vista Security Tool

By Janet Harris

Symantec, the US security company, is planning to develop a technology which can make security decisions for Vista owners dealing with User Account Control.

The User Account Control feature in the Vista operating system requests permission to disable security barriers to the inner workings of a PC whenever software tries to access these.

Symantec believes that the high frequency of the requests makes the feature ineffective because users tire of the requests and tend to turn the User Account Control feature off.

The Vista feature allows people to run a computer with fewer user privileges, which specify the level of the user’s interaction with software on the PC. It is designed to minimise the damage which malicious code can do to a level significantly lower than is possible on a machine running in administrator mode - a typical setting on Windows XP.

Symantec has not yet announced any specific feature as it is still in the research stage, with prototypes in development.