US Patent 7797733 Monitoring and controlling services

A service manager (101) monitors and controls services (111), thereby providing protection against associated security vulnerabilities. The service manager (101) intercepts calls (105) to service related operations made by acting applications (103) and determines which acting application (103) made a specific intercepted call (105) to which target service (111). The service manager (101) then determines and executes an appropriate action based on a system policy (113). The appropriate action can comprise blocking the call (105), thereby preventing execution of service (111) based operations that conflict with the system policy (113).