Year-end is supposed to be about code freezes, change freezes, and maybe a quiet office with too many snacks in the break room.
What nobody wants is a holiday security incident caused by a user who still has full local admin rights.
We put together a short, cartoon-style video that tells a very familiar story:
- One user with local admin (“just for a quick install”).
- A laptop full of random tools, drivers, and unexpected surprises.
- An IT team trying to contain the mess right before the holidays.
- And the “after” view, where users stay standard but legacy apps still get the elevation they need with Elevator.
Watch the video
What the video is really about
The video is light-hearted, but the pattern is real. Most environments still have a few legacy Windows applications that only behave if the user is effectively an admin. Instead of fixing the app, the quick workaround is to leave people in the local Administrators group.
Over time that leads to:
- A much larger attack surface on endpoints.
- Harder incident response when “anything could have been changed”.
- Holiday and year-end incidents nobody wants to deal with.
In our longer posts like The Double-Edged Sword of Local Admin Rights and Why Legacy Windows Apps Still Need Admin Rights (And What To Do About It), we dig into the details of why this happens and how to design a proper least-privilege strategy.
Where Elevator fits in
Elevator is our Windows-focused way to get out of the “everyone is admin” trap without breaking those older applications. It:
- Allows non-admin users to run specific Windows applications with admin rights.
- Uses an explicit list of executables you define, rather than elevating everything.
- Lets you remove local admin rights while keeping users productive.
So the “after Elevator” part of the video is the important one: the app gets the admin rights it still needs, but the user doesn’t.
If you would like to test this with a couple of your own legacy apps, you can start a free Elevator trial and see how it feels to remove local admin without causing a flood of tickets.
Happy holidays from UNYK
However your environment looks today, we hope the video gives you a smile – and maybe a small push to retire a few unnecessary local admin accounts before the next holiday season.
Wishing you an incident-free holiday from the team at UNYK and Elevator.
