NEW: Atera Agent uninstall prevention

@nina - From the KB article you linked to, I see the following exceptions to the restricted uninstall of the Atera agent:

Exceptions include using system privileges (GPO, CMD, Powershell, WMI), deleting the device from the Atera console, setting "UninstallOverride"=true in the registry, or if "integratorlogin" is missing from the system settings.

Is there somewhere else that expands on this a little further?

1. Do "system privileges" mean a local administrator, the SYSTEM account, or a user with an elevated admin token?
2. Where exactly should the UninstallOverride property exist in the Windows Registry, and what type is it?
3. If the IntegratorLogin property is missing, when does it need to be missing? When the Atera agent starts?

Please give some actual detail on how this prevents users from uninstalling. Most software that has this type of feature, there's an "Uninstall Password" we set to prevent uninstallation.

Really nice!! Thanks for implementing! :-)

I agree with @nathan. The other products I use (and have used) have passwords to secure the installation.

@nina and @Yasmin from Atera The uninstall prevention feature isn't working right now, so I can't test this, but bypassing and uninstalling the agent would look something like this in Powershell:

[Microsoft.Win32.Registry]::SetValue('HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ATERA Networks\AlphaAgent','UninstallOverride','true',[Microsoft.Win32.RegistryValueKind]::String)
Restart-Service -Name AteraAgent -Force ; Get-CimInstance -ClassName CIM_Product -Filter "Name like 'AteraAgent'" | Invoke-CimMethod -MethodName 'Uninstall'

With Atera's current solution to protect against agent uninstalls, I certainly wouldn't brand the feature as "securing" the agent. Adding a password would be a much better step in the direction of securing the agent.

If you want an example of using a password, you're already integrated with ESET. Check out their implementation of securing their management agent with a password.

@dfletcher I've had this happen with several features before. Sometimes Atera will release a feature into production but then pull it because it's not quite ready for primetime. I'm sure it will be back soon. But it was definitely not a beta feature.

@nathan

Retired devices - should be in a section called "Reporting" and renamed to "Not recently seen" because, just because it hasn't been switched on recently - does not mean it is retired it could be a laptop that is only used twice a year as a standby, but just should be excluded from certain patch compliance reports etc.

@nina ^^ this. It would also be great if retired devices weren't counted when generating invoices either (see this post)

Hi @AElliott,

I had a few agents a while ago that wouldn’t let me connect using splashtop because there was a version conflict with the Splashtop RMM. While it was not convenient, I got on the phone with the customer, used Anydesk to connect and fix Splashtop. You do have the option when connecting to clients with other choices such as TeamViewer, Anydesk, and Splashtop. I have used scripts in the Shared Library to send scripts through the agent that was working in the cmd prompt to also fix the Splashtop connection issue. Like I mentioned before it’s not a convenient solution, but as we know with a lot of remote connections, that can be a problem when it drops off.