Manchester, UK (29th July 2009) Avecto Ltd, the most trusted name in least privilege management for corporate desktops, today announced the release of Privilege Guard 2.1. “Many organizations want to remove local admin rights from their users, but don’t know where to start, as they are unsure of why users require a privileged account”, said Mark Austin, CTO at Avecto.

With the new Privilege Monitoring capability, Privilege Guard can be deployed in passive mode and it will analyze application behaviour, identifying any applications that would fail to run under a standard user account. “Privilege Monitoring takes the hard work out of policy definition, by automatically identifying problem applications and any other tasks that require the user to be logged on with a privileged account”, said Gavin Wilson, Senior Support Analyst, Oxford University Press. “Applications that have been identified as requiring elevated rights can be added to the Privilege Guard policy, enabling admin rights to be removed from users.”

Privilege Monitoring is backed up by detailed activity reporting, which provides in depth analysis of any privileged activity, including access to files, registry settings, services and kernel objects. This analysis can be captured in passive mode or as part of Privilege Guard’s elevation policies, complimenting the existing auditing capabilities with deep application forensics.

Other new features in Privilege Guard 2.1 include application templates, which provide pick lists for common Windows tasks, such as adding local printers and the installation of well known ActiveX controls, like Adobe Flash Player. Enhancements to Privilege Guard’s shell integration provide the ability to hide the Windows “Run as” and “Run as administrator” shell context menu items, for an improved user experience. To find out about the other new features in Privilege Guard 2.1 and to download an evaluation, register at www.avecto.com/download.