355
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
It might just be because I am already "that parent", but it would be a strong NO from me - and the school administration would get a strong talking to about this. I would push to have that policy ...
AviD♦
- 73.5k
152
votes
Accepted
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Needing to install things is kind of the point of needing the laptop, so it makes perfect sense that they want to install Office, AV, and certificates. There are no surprises there. To do that, they ...
- 132k
139
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
I wouldn't.
You have no real way to tell exactly what they've changed. Some schools are excessively nosy or controlling.
And even if the district is being respectful of your privacy, they could have a ...
- 3,952
63
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Others have already stated why this is a bad idea and I fully agree, don't let them install those stuff (certificates??, no way), now, you don't have to be that parent if you present some options:
...
- 747
44
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Under these circumstances, the ideal case is simple.
Get a "burner" laptop for schoolwork only.
Use standard tech and low specs suitable for the work at hand (contact their IT dept to find out what ...
- 571
35
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Now the school IT department wants to install some software on the laptop and is asking for administrative access.
The school does it because it's easy for them. Lots of parents are computer ...
- 31.6k
34
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
From a sysadmins point of view:
They want to install Office, Outlook, an AV and some site certificates.
If you already have an AV installed, (which you should), then another AV will conflict with ...
- 540
16
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Let's break this down:
Your concerns as a parent
Privacy: You don't want school staff being able to view what sites your kid is visiting, what files they have on their laptop, and other things that ...
- 59.2k
15
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
I don't think anyone else has discussed the certificate issue:
In my experience, a lot of schools use a MITM firewall to intercept HTTP traffic for their filtering policies such as to look at the ...
- 321
14
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
I'm going to provide a situation that I have experience with, and then draw parallels. I am a Software Engineer, and have worked at several shops with a BYOD (bring your own device) mentality. Each of ...
- 241
13
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Both a burner laptop and a virtual machine are respectable options.
Multiboot is not, as any time the hostile os is running it can modify the clean os, with beyond-admin privileges.
I feel like ...
12
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
No.
My kid is starting 6th grade and the school requires him to get a laptop and bring it to school.
No.
The school can ...
- 520
10
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
Big No!
While most everything has been covered, there is still the issue of child safety. Every year there are multiple lawsuits about schools spying on kids through their webcams. While you might ...
- 1,096
9
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
To add to the others: Have a look at the list:
They want to install Office, Outlook, an AV and some site certificates.
Why?
Installing Office means teaching a dependency on a big vendor early. ...
- 3,451
7
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
To minimize your hassle, I suggest you inquire about minimum specs and buy your child a "work" laptop to be used only for school. Then you just let them do whatever they want. Then the school is at ...
- 702
6
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
If I were a parent, I would firmly say no to this. This is mainly because the laptop is paid by the parent. You should have control over what you buy, and I believe that it is already pushing it to ...
- 61
5
votes
Accepted
What can someone do with (non-admin) command prompt on a network?
There's nothing you can do with cmd that you can't do with any other program, except run cmd. This will actually break some malware that specifically tries to invoke cmd without having fallbacks to ...
- 50.3k
4
votes
Accepted
How does consent.exe know what to display?
As you can see, the first argument is the PID of consent.exe's parent process.
And by monitoring the APIs that this parent process (which is a "svchost") called before creating the consent process, I ...
- 66
4
votes
How can I disable execution of programs from Downloads directory in Windows 10?
Changing permissions on the directory is probably the best way to go, yes. In addition to being relatively easy, it has the perk of acting more like the way most Unix-like systems work, where new (in ...
- 50.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Suspicious app name in Windows 10 permission prompt
This is expected behaviour. When you install an MSI package, Windows caches a copy of the installer in "%windir%\installer" (a hidden system folder) and renames it using a random hex name. You can ...
- 178
4
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
While many answers here outline potential dangers arising from giving someone admin access, it should also be noted that it's also a reasonable tool for the job the school IT is about to do. That's ...
- 10.2k
3
votes
What can I do to prevent my web browser from accessing local files?
In answer to the question there is no global way to stop access to local files for ALL browsers via the address bar or via a web link.
You may though be able to block these links via your AV or anti ...
- 3,280
3
votes
What is the main risk of allowing services to logon as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM?
Worst case scenario
When an attacker exploits an application to run arbitrary code then this code will run under the context (and thus the privileges) of the exploited application. So if the service ...
- 322
3
votes
Securing a process from local users
As long as the user is not a local administrator on the machine they should not have permission to kill any processes run as other users (including domain administrators).
However unless you have an ...
- 11k
3
votes
Accepted
Does the separation of the OS partition (C:) and data partition (D:) in Windows increase security?
My opinion is that with correct permissions, in Windows, the
separation of partitions does not increase security because what is
most important are the permissions and the separation of the
...
- 3,398
3
votes
Should I let my child's school have access to my kid's personal laptop?
The school "needs to install certificates"? That definitely is a red flag.
As for installing Office, I would say install a copy on the computer for him rather than let the school do it. While some ...
- 87
3
votes
Accepted
How is the use of Process Monitor a security risk?
Process Monitor needs to run with Administrator rights. In fact, it installs a driver to peek on the actions performed on the filesystem, registry, network, etc.
As it obtains data system-wide, the ...
- 19k
2
votes
How to find who granted local admin privileges to a user?
You can use Powershell to filter the right events:
Get-EventLog Security -InstanceId 4732
Heres a powershell command to get all the eventlog entries for which an user was added to local ...
- 21
2
votes
Securing a process from local users
Barring any exploits, there are two different scenarios here.
If the process is owned by a different user account (e.g. it's owned by the local system account):
One needs to be a member of the local ...
- 247
2
votes
Security benefits of running as standard user vs. administrator
In an enterprise environment only a small subset of users should ever have local admin rights if you want the systems to remain secure.
Thankfully, Windows 10 has mitigated some of these issues ...
- 7,142
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible