 Recently, it was discovered that Microsoft is no longer allowing consumers to disable Windows Defender antivirus tool via the Windows Registry. Microsoft originally remained tight-lighted on the changes made to Windows 10’s antivirus tool, but the company has now shared more details on the whole controversy. Microsoft again confirmed that it has retired ‘DisableAntiSpyware’ to prevent users from disabling Windows Defender via Windows Registry. However, Microsoft says it has retired the legacy option to disable the antivirus because it no longer makes any sense in the latest version of Defender. Windows Defender is designed to turn off automatically whenever users try to install another antivirus product, so it doesn’t really make sense to disable Windows 10’s built-in protection tool manually, according to Microsoft. ‘DisableAntiSpyware’ is designed only for IT pros and admins to disable the antivirus engine whenever they need to install their own security product. “The impact of the DisableAntiSpyware removal is limited to Windows 10 versions prior to 1903 using Microsoft Defender Antivirus. This change does not impact third party antivirus connections to the Windows Security app. Those will still work as expected,” Microsoft noted. By retiring this feature, Microsoft will also prevent attackers from turning off Windows Defender. A report suggests that Windows 10’s built-in antivirus software ‘Windows Defender’ has been updated with a new feature that could be abused by attackers to download malware from the internet. According to security researcher Askar, Windows Defender has been updated with a new command-line feature called “MpCmdRun.exe”, otherwise known as Microsoft Antimalware Service Command Line Utility. Security researcher Askar claims that these changes to the Windows Defender-powered command-line tool could be abused by attackers as a living-off-the-land binary (LOLBin). In other words, hackers can abuse these binaries and download any file from the internet, including malware. It also means that users will be able to use Windows Defender itself to download any file from the internet. This is unlikely to be a major security flaw as files are still checked by Windows Defender after you finish the download using the command-line tool. In theory, Windows Defender tool can’t be used to download any malware that could infect your system, but this is an odd change, and security researchers believe that it could be abused. Details are posted on OUR FORUM.  If you've kept on top of the latest Windows 10 developments, you may have spotted the Windows 10 VPN client's existence. It sounds super promising by its very name, suggesting you don't need a dedicated VPN solution, and you can simply flick it at any time you need the added protection and security. Dig a little deeper, however, and you may be disappointed by what the built-in VPN client means for you. While the built-in client is likely enough for some people, there will be others who are looking for more from it. Read on and we'll tell you everything you need to know about the Windows 10 VPN and whether it's worth using. You see the words 'VPN client,' and you think it'll solve all your VPN needs, right? Well, the Windows 10 VPN client isn't really a VPN service all of its own. Effectively, it's a desktop client that helps you connect to a third-party VPN network separately. Yup, it's a container basically. You'll still need to subscribe to a 'proper' VPN service to take advantage of the Windows 10 VPN client. This does mean that you won't need to download any additional software, which is something that will make some people happy. But, are the feature trade-offs worth it when you could just download the VPN's own client instead? Well, let's keep looking at what the Windows 10 client offers. Once you've hooked up your full VPN service with the Windows 10 VPN client, you might think it's plain sailing from now on. Unfortunately, there are some further restrictions. You have to set up a connection profile to use it, and each profile only has room for one server address and one connection protocol. If you like to switch between different servers regularly through your VPN, this immediately restricts your options unless you keep creating new profiles. We'll be blunt - the Windows 10 built-in VPN client isn't great for everyone. It needs a bit of technical knowledge as it asks you about protocol choices and other features that most VPN service clients don't bother asking anymore. They're far more intuitive and user-friendly than the Windows option. There's also the matter of needing to set up yet another client when you've already just signed up for a VPN service. It feels like an unnecessary step because it is. The Windows 10 VPN client is super rudimentary. It looks like one of the more technical sides of Windows when numerous VPN apps look more attractive. At their simplest, VPN service clients tend to include maps that help you pick what location server you want to connect to, but they also offer extra features that can be very useful. We've said many negative things about the Windows 10 built-in VPN client and for a good reason. For most users, it's simply pointless. If you've just signed up for a VPN service, it makes far more sense to use the VPN's dedicated app to connect and switch between servers. It's simpler to use, and you'll have the full wealth of features that the VPN offers made available to you. There is an exception to this rule, though. If you're technically minded and keen to avoid the potential bloat of having unnecessary apps installed, the Windows 10 VPN client does offer benefits. You don't need to install any extra apps to connect to your chosen VPN which is useful if you have limited space, or if your system is very low spec and needs all the help it can get to keep running smoothly. Complete details are posted on OUR FORUM.
 Today we are excited to release a new build of the Windows Server vNext Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release that contains both the Desktop Experience and Server Core installation options for Datacenter and Standard editions. There are some features to look for such as UDP performance improvements — UDP is becoming a very popular protocol carrying more and more networking traffic. With the QUIC protocol built on top of UDP and the increasing popularity of RTP and custom (UDP) streaming and gaming protocols, it is time to bring the performance of UDP to a level on par with TCP. In Server vNext we include the game-changing UDP Segmentation Offload (USO). USO moves most of the work required to send UDP packets from the CPU to the NIC’s specialized hardware. Complimenting USO in Server vNext we include UDP Receive Side Coalescing (UDP RSC) which coalesces packets and reduces CPU usage for UDP processing. To go along with these two new enhancements, we have made hundreds of improvements to the UDP data path both transmit and receive. TCP performance improvements — Server vNext uses TCP HyStart++ to reduce packet loss during connection startup (especially in high-speed networks) and SendTracker + RACK to reduce Retransmit TimeOuts (RTO). These features are enabled in the transport stack by default and provide a smoother network data flow with better performance at high speeds. PktMon support in TCPIP — The cross-component network diagnostics tool for Windows now has TCPIP support providing visibility into the networking stack. PktMon can be used for packet capture, packet drop detection, packet filtering, and counting for virtualization scenarios, like container networking and SDN. You're also likely to see Improved RSC in the vSwitch. RSC in the vSwitch has been improved for better performance. First released in Windows Server 2019, Receive Segment Coalescing (RSC) in the vSwitch enables packets to be coalesced and processed as one larger segment upon entry in the virtual switch. This greatly reduces the CPU cycles consumed processing each byte (Cycles/byte). However, in its original form, once traffic exited the virtual switch, it would be re-segmented for travel across the VMBus. In Windows Server vNext, segments will remain coalesced across the entire data path until processed by the intended application. Now you can keep things together or apart. When moving a role, the affinity object ensures that it can be moved. The object also looks for other objects and verifies those as well, including disks, so you can have storage affinity with virtual machines (or Roles) and Cluster Shared Volumes (storage affinity) if desired. You can add roles to multiples such as Domain controllers, for example. You can set an AntiAffinity rule so that the DCS remains in a different fault domain. You can then set an affinity rule for each of the DCS to their specific CSV drive so they can stay together. If you have SQL Server VMs that need to be on each side with a specific DC, you can set an Affinity Rule of the same fault domain between each SQL and their respective DC. Because it is now a cluster object, if you were to try and move a SQL VM from one site to another, it checks all cluster objects associated with it. It seems there is a pairing with the DC in the same site. It then sees that DC has a rule and verifies it. It seems that DC cannot be in the same fault domain as the other DC, so the move is disallowed. BitLocker has been available for Failover Clustering for quite some time. The requirement was the cluster nodes must be all in the same domain as the BitLocker key is tied to the Cluster Name Object (CNO). However, for those clusters at the edge, workgroup clusters, and multidomain clusters, Active Directory may not be present. With no Active Directory, there is no CNO. These cluster scenarios had no data-at-rest security. Starting with this Windows Server Insiders, we introduced our own BitLocker key stored locally (encrypted) for the cluster to use. This additional key will only be created when the clustered drives are BitLocker protected after cluster creation. Complete details are posted on OUR FORUM. |
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