Series
The Windows Security Wars
6 parts of 6
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In 1995-2001 the worms won. The Trustworthy Computing memo and the ten-week Windows Security Push that followed taught the industry how to ship secure software.
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How Microsoft re-engineered Windows around security between January 2002 and October 2009 -- and why a wormable RCE patched on October 23, 2008 still infected nine to fifteen million machines.
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Microsoft killed the rootkit class with AppLocker, Secure Boot, ELAM, and AppContainer. Then a side project in C named Mimikatz proved the wrong layer had been hardened.
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Windows 10 ships Virtualization-Based Security and finally puts the credential store above the kernel -- in the same five years that ransomware became a billion-dollar industry.
- Part 5 The Thirteen Months That Made Zero Trust Unavoidable: The Windows Security Wars Part 5 (2020-2023)
Four incidents in thirteen months -- SolarWinds, ProxyLogon, PrintNightmare, Log4Shell -- broke four Windows architectural assumptions and forced the Zero Trust pivot the industry had on the shelf since August 2020.
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How Storm-0558, CrowdStrike, and the Recall saga forced Microsoft to admit the biggest attack surface on a modern Windows PC is no longer the OS itself.