Microsoft Corp. is working on patches for several services within Windows that run with inappropriately high privileges, making the operating system vulnerable to a sophisticated attack that could lead to a complete compromise of the machine. The fixes in the works are meant to prevent interactive services on the Windows desktop from running with the same privileges as the most highly privileged service. By design, all of the interactive services are on an equal footing and can trade requests with other services on the desktop. This fact means that an attacker who was able to gain control of one of the services could then use it to elevate his privileges and possibly gain control of the system.
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