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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

The exploit under discussion is an attack on Windows Update, it doesn't AFAICT involved running privileged code as the user. Also the default Windows user has been non-Administrator for many years now. It's true you can fool users into elevating a shell or whatever, but that's true for pretty much all platforms.

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I'm happy to complain about Windows, but I will say their progress in converting their ecosystem to user-by-default with elevation prompt warnings has been impressive.

Especially when they had to drag their developer community kicking and screaming to it. (in Windows Vista ~2006)

Afaicr, there's also a neat bit where the lock screen and UAC prompt actually run under an entirely different, privileged and restricted session (than the normal one the user is interacting with and running programs in).

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

Apparently now termed the "secure desktop", it's transparently overlaid on top of the user desktop whenever you see a prompt.

It's not a transparent overlay, it's a completely separate desktop with a screenshot of the user desktop as its background. Really clever.

And 50% of the times, the background fails to load and I have to double check. At first I thought it may be my specfic hardware combo but no.

And that the desktops are securable objects[1], so processes in the default desktop can't snoop on what's going on in the winlogon desktop say when the UAC prompt is shown.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winstation/d...

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