Originally Posted by
AquaKnight
http:///forum/post/3297446
I had a virus that hacked administrator rights, and wouldn't allow most of the programs to run, even malwarebytes when logged in as the admin on safe mode.
They are out there, but they are not common.
Here's a true story.
I manage an IT department that serves about 150 users, 120 of which are in our US office where I work. Most people were used to getting malware on a fairly regular basis... some users got it several times a year, others several times a week. On average, we were cleaning at least several machines daily and dealing with a major virus outbreak in the office that brought our systems to a standstill about once a year. This was seriously impacting everyone's productivity.
We tried practically begging people to only use their PCs to for business internet use, but nobody would listen. We made the (highly unpopular and controversial) decision to remove their administrative privileges on the machines for people and force them to run with regular user accounts.
This was six years ago. Since then, we should have dealt with over 1000 machine cleanups and at least half a dozen major virus outbreaks.
Number of machine cleanups? 3. We had one a few years ago, one last year, and one a few months ago.
Number of virus outbreaks? 0
The moral of the story is that removing administrative privleges from the user account you use day to day to does not guarantee that you'll neverbe infected, but it removes more than 99% of the chances of a problem and damage to your machine.
BTW... perhaps your administrative user account had a simple password. Malware can still run when you aren't an admin, it just can't make any changes to your OS. However, it can run a enumerate your accounts and run a dictionary attack against your administrative user account. Make sure any user account that has admin priviledges has a complex password.
it would open up 
