Free Local Admin Discovery Tool First Step In Locking Down Admin Rights

PRESS RELEASE

Waltham, MA – December 11, 2012 – The free Local Admin Discovery Tool from Viewfinity (www.viewfinity.com), the innovator of privilege management solutions, allows organizations to discover user accounts and groups that are members of the local “administrators” built-in user group on computers in their Windows system domains.

Facing today's unprecedented security threats, organizations of all sizes in all industries around the globe are asking the same basic question: How do we start a project like this? IT managers must have a planned approach to tackle this issue. Viewfinity answers this and the daunting question "Do you even know who has the local admin and application rights?"

"The Local Admin Discovery tool from Viewfinity allowed me to effectively gauge our IT department's progress in eliminating local administrators on our client systems," said Melissa S. Yee, Technical Analysis Advisor, Dell Services.

Andrew Barrett, Information Technology Officer for Scholle Packaging, explained, “Once our migration to Windows 7 was underway, we embarked on another major initiative which was to eliminate administrative rights from all endpoints. The first step was to get an accurate picture of who had local administrative rights. This was very important to understand because we have legacy applications in our environment that require administrative rights to run and we didn’t want to impede user productivity by prematurely removing those rights.

“We came across the Viewfinity Local Admin Discovery Tool. It identified which user accounts and groups were members of our local “Administrators” in our Windows domain. Having this information allowed us to quickly reassess who should have these rights, and easily remove those who shouldn’t have admin rights. This tool was instrumental in helping us approach our removal of administrative rights in an efficient, non-disruptive manner,” Barrett said.

Being a local Administrator presents an unwelcomed opportunity for damage to been done to the computer, either intentionally or accidentally, thus causing additional troubleshooting and repair work for IT and downtime for the end users. Often the damage, such as a virus or malware invasion, may even jeopardize other computers in a network as well. Having detailed information related to which users and groups have administrator rights on corporate desktops allows organizations to reassess who should have these rights. Once the analysis has been run, IT Administrators can take action, if needed, by removing the users or suspicious groups from the Administrators group.

To date, more than 1,600 IT security professionals have downloaded the Viewfinity Local Admin Discovery tool. It is available at https://www.viewfinity.com/Resources/Discover_Desktops.aspx, and is also available on a wide range of free download sites on the web.

About Viewfinity

Viewfinity provides privilege management and application control for desktops, laptops and servers, empowering enterprises to meet compliance mandates, reduce security risks, and lower IT costs. The Viewfinity solution allows enterprises to control end user and privileged user rights for applications and systems which require elevated permissions. Viewfinity's granular-level control enables companies to establish and enforce consistent policies for least privilege Windows-based environments based on segregation of duties. For more information, visit www.viewfinity.com.