I work in a mixed environment of both Windows and Linux and in my opinion sudo is very similar to Windows UAC and local admin rights. In that, you can give some

I work in a mixed environment of both Windows and Linux and in my opinion sudo is very similar to Windows UAC and local admin rights. In that, you can give someone access to a computer without sudo or local admin rights and they won't be able to make any system-wide changes. But for someone who does have sudo or local admin rights, then it's just a safeguard that should hopefully make the user think twice before escalating their privileges. If a Windows user is tricked into downloading some malware, and runs it by using their local admin rights to bypass the UAC prompt, then the system is owned. I believe this is the same risk with sudo, although the hope is that the extra authentication prompt gives the user the opportunity to re-evaluate whether or not they want to run the command as a privileged user.