You Use Windows. Be Resilient (Premium)

Thanks to last Summer's CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft has been binging on resiliency in Windows and throughout the ecosystem. As a user, you should consider doing the same. The good news is, most of this is automatic, thanks to protections built in to Windows. But some of it is common sense. And some does require a bit of work on your part.

This is a big enough topic that it's unlikely I can cover it all in a single article. And full disclosure, I'm not a security expert. But as a full-time industry observer with over 30 years of experience that includes being victimized by bad advice, ignorance, and bad luck, I feel like I'm in a pretty good headspace when it comes to securing personal technology devices, especially PCs. Feel free to chime in otherwise if you think differently. Just be prepared to defend your opinions: There is too much noise out there about the things that don't matter--Recall, for example--and too little good information about those that do.

You know what Microsoft is doing.

Thanks to a series of security events that include a still-not-fully-disclosed hack of its corporate infrastructure, Microsoft created a Secure Future Initiative (SFI) by which it is securing its entire stack against cyberattacks and other security problems, both new and well-understood. And thanks to CrowdStrike, Microsoft has amped up its SFI efforts by working with the industry to better protect the entire ecosystem. This is all solid work, but it's also mostly external to whatever we can do as individuals.

Tied to SFI, Microsoft last year announced the Windows Resiliency Initiative, which is, of course, specific to the platform I care about the most. From an end user perspective, the biggest changes that it announced at the time, perhaps, were Quick Machine Recovery (QMR), a feature that is available now through the Insider Program and will soon be updated with a simpler user interface, and Administrator protection, which we now know is coming to consumers too. But Microsoft is also wrapping in some existing Windows 11 security features--like Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In Security (ESS)--that are either under-used or not well understood.

Today, we got a small Windows Resiliency Initiative update, but most of that is not applicable to end users. And that's what kicked this off. We need information that is applicable to real people. Good information.

Windows 11 gets a bad rap for all kinds of reasons. Some of it is absolutely deserved, as I outlined in my Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist. Some of it is imagined or even invented, and this is where my bile rises as I watch YouTubers get cheap views by pontificating about nothing. But security, like privacy, is important. Too important for sensationalism and bad advice.

It's also too important to get caught up in yet another 6,000 word editorial, one that many will simply skip over or maybe miss the most important points. So here, I will be as brief as possible. And I will...