As shipped and installed, Windows NT is configured to provide a high degree of ease of use. In some cases, this ease of use can be seen as a security threat. This is particularly true of "denial of service" attacks, in which a user is able to deny others the use of various parts of the system. There are a number of components of the underlying mechanisms of Windows NT that may be affected in this manner by anyone with the programming knowledge to locate and manipulate them.
A highly security-conscious system administrator might choose to trade this ease of use for added security. It is impossible to enumerate all the ways in which this tradeoff might be seen or experienced by each user or application. However, you can expect that the biggest area of impact will be for users that redefine system-wide resource attributes, such as the attributes of COM1: or of printers. In general, by tightening base security, you must accept that these shared resources will be administered only by system administrators.
To strongly protect shared objects, use the Registry Editor to create or assign the following Registry key value:
Hive: | HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM |
Key: | \CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager |
Name: | ProtectionMode |
Type: | REG_DWORD |
Value: | 1 |
If this value does not exist, or is set to anything other than one (1), then standard protection is applied to these objects.
The changes take effect the next time the computer is started. You might want to update the Emergency Repair Disk to reflect these changes.