Microsoft Could Make Potentially Unwanted Apps a Thing of the Past
Microsoft has just announced that it has built in protection against Potentially Unwanted Application (PUA) into its latest version of System Center Endpoint Protection. The new feature is also available in Forefront Endpoint Protection, giving your enterprise a 360 degree sphere of protection against PUAs.
What exactly is a PUA? Have you ever downloaded a productivity app, for example, an app that helps you print digital documents into PDF format.
When clicking next, next, next during the install, you may inadvertently decide to install a potentially unwanted application. That application may contain adware, spyware or perform some other invasive tactic in order to serve up advertisements to the end user.
“These applications can increase the risk of your network being infected with malware, cause malware infections to be harder to identify among the noise, and can waste help desk, IT, and user time cleaning up the applications,” says a Microsoft blog post concerning the announcement.
“Since the stakes are higher in an enterprise environment, the potential disaster that PUA brings can be a cause of concern. Hence, it is important to deliver trusted protection in this field,” the post went on to say.
Administrators can use these tools to get a comprehensive report of the PUAs in their environment. End users will get notifications if the real time scanning module finds any sort of PUA on a system. When organizations can rid their network of these apps, business processes will be able to flow unhindered. Business can rapidly implement this technology using various deployment methods.
Microsoft’s TechNet blog has different methods in which you can deploy the advanced protection to enterprise workstations. You can use System Center, Group Policy or perform the change manually using the registry. A full write up can be found here.
