found this to be salient, there's a lot of malice to be done in plain sight of an ignorant user: Root access is only needed if you want to modify the system in some way so as to avoid detection. Doing so is by no means necessary however, and a lot of malware is more than happy to operate as a standard user, never once raising an elevation prompt and silently infection or copying files or sending out data or doing processing, or whatever malicious thing it may do.