Joanna Rutkowska has always been a big supporter of the Windows Vista security model. Until she stumbled upon a "very severe hole" in the design of UAC (User Account Control) and found out — from Microsoft officials — that the default no-admin setting isn't even a security mechanism anymore. Joanna Rutkowska
Rutkowska, a hacker with a track record of defeating Vista's security mechanisms, believes UAC has a major flaw in the way it automatically assumes that all setup programs (application installers) should be run with administrator privileges.
"When you try to run such a program, you get a UAC prompt and you have only two choices: either to agree to run this application as administrator or to disallow running it at all. That means that if you downloaded some freeware Tetris game, you will have to run its installer as administrator, giving it not only full access to all your file system and registry, but also allowing it to load kernel drivers! Why should a Tetris installer be allowed to load kernel drivers?," Rutkowska asked in a post on her Invisible Things blog.
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In simple terms microsoft have done everything possible to remove kernel access to all its users, implement a very low privileged user for internet explorer, then bombard their users with popups telling you eactly what the operating system is doing and go right ahead and completely destroy any decent security they have implemented by making all installers run as admin in the name of ease of use.
bravo microsoft
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=29
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