The study of around 15 months-worth of IT security bulletins from Microsoft, says that 90% of critical vulnerabilities can be remediated by removing admin rights from users, and setting them up as humble regular users on their Windows 7 machines.
The research from BeyondTrust also says that 100% of MS Office vulnerabilities in 2009 and 100% of Internet Explorer 8 security issues identified in that same year could be solved by this IT methodology.
Steve Kelly, executive vice president of BeyondTrust's corporate development, said that enterprises continue to face danger from zero-day attacks as new vulnerabilities are exploited before patches can ever be developed and deployed.
"Our findings reflect the critical role that restricting administrator rights play in protecting against these types of threats", he said.
"As companies migrate to Windows 7 they need to be aware that despite enhanced security features on the new operating systems, better controls for administrative rights are still needed to provide adequate protection", he added.
Delving into the report reveals that the majority of vulnerabilities share the same best practice advice in the 'mitigating factors' portion of Microsoft security bulletins.
Or as BeyondTrust puts it: "Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights."