Let's look at the last 3 months I have figures for, now these security fixes only not updates are for all Microsoft products but mainly W10/11, Some of the security fixes are for known holes in windows going back to win 2000 that they never bothered with, [I won't get Dec anaalsis till next week]
Oh I know why you'd have a security department, I'm not arguing that, I'm WONDERING why you wouldn't need one for Windows 10 but you would for Windows 11, they're both just as insecure as the other.
Our windows 11 machines have been collecting data and sending it to weird places. Originally we thought it was malware or that our network was compromised in some way. They issue fixes, updates undo our manual fixes and it became so overwhelming for our small IT team that we had to hire more than just a few system admins. It expanded to a full time security consultant who quickly became over whelmed and now there are concerns of not being able to properly monitor the W11 machines, like my laptop, when they aren't using the network in our main office. So while we always had a network security guy as part of our IT department, the amount of work this has caused us to considering creating an entire department to work along side our IT department just to monitor what these machines are doing, the data they are collecting to check for our "fixes" that get undone by windows updating.
Windows has been doing that since Vista really, they stepped it up a notch with Windows 7, then today's telemetry data collecting has been about the same since Windows 8, it's not some new thing for Windows 11.
I mean, that's fair, I just don't understand why it's only now becoming a thing for your IT department and it wasn't a think when Windows 10 released? Or Windows 8? Or Windows 7?
I do get the unpredictableness, It kinda sounds like you guys weren't looking at weird network traffic until recently though, Windows has been doing that since I've been involved with firewalls and network traffic inspection (Windows 7 onwards). Even Microsoft's own SIEM built into 365 comes up with vast amounts of nothingness.
Oh seen this a lot, we've resorted to just telling companies to transition over to using Edge, It's Chrome but you login with your work Microsoft account, so it's safer overall anyway, we've had little resistence to be honest, the EU once punished Microsoft for this behaviour, apparently it's absolutely fine to do now.
I'd love to know what the fix was for that, rarely see MFA go terribly wrong unless a third party service that runs the actual MFA system goes down.
Back in 2018 even Windows 10 was given my billion dollar company fits! We used two factor authentication with a smart card. Came in one day and after a Windows 10 update no one could log in! Took the IT department until 2PM to get it fixed! Everyone sat around chatting or on their phones until 2PM!!! We were even slow to upgrade to Windows 10, we were on Windows 7 for a year after normal support stopped! We paid for extended support!
So I don't remember what the fix was, but I do remember the problem. The dongles are set to short the memory chip if it thinks that someone is trying to image the drive. Something Windows 11 was doing was making the dongles thing someone was trying to make an image of the data on them and they all bricked themselves. We all received new dongles about a week later. The Dongles connected to the W10 machines didn't brick themselves, this was back in may of 2023
Well it started with the Windows 11 machines, but the windows 10 machines have started doing it, too. The way we have the machines setup is that it creates essentially a VPN tunnel to the servers back in the office. The machines cannot connect to any servers other than our company servers. No facebook, no youtube, nothing. The thing is, once connected to the company servers, Windows 11 (and now windows 10) was trying to "get out" of our network. One reason that we thought that our network was compromised was that it looked like our machines were trying to perform a DDOS attack for the amount of requests they were sending out. It was overwhelming our firewall and that is run by 2, 64core EPYC chips. It still does this after security updates, it's trying to send out tons of data to tons of different servers. It very much looks like a DDOS and it does slow down the rest of our servers significantly.
So what ended up happening is that we started getting government contracts in 2016 and they have certain security standards and protocols that we need to follow. I'm afraid I can't say anymore than that.
The weird network traffic problem didn't start until late 2022. Aside from storage and hardware upgrades, our network has been relatively unchanged since 2016. Our hardware firewall was overkill for what we needed and still is. It rarely goes above 10% load. However, they started noticing patterns of it being under 100% load for extended periods of time. They ended up tracking the problem to MS servers used to collect system usage data. The thing is, our windows enterprise license explicitly forbids them from collecting system usage data. After updates, they start trying to send out tons of data. The IT department calls our contact at MS, says, "hey, what the F^%&, you guys can't be doing this crap" and then computers stop trying to send out tons of data a day or two after.
Supposedly the Win 11 24H2 will allow you to install on a non TPM 2 motherboard, going to order a test hard drive to try it on a 2011 socket 775 Quad core with 16gb memory (Has Win 10 on it right now)!
There is a specific amount of money an ordinary person can pay for subscriptions.
I switch to linux Mint here in my studio. We have 12 computers, mainly with no more than 4 years os use, but even that these computers are W11 compatible, we decided do go to Debian based Linux, or Linux Mint. 4 others machines still run W10. We are under a big and well configured hardware firewall, (under Linux off course) so security is not a big concerned .
not so, both are UNIX based this basic family tree may help
it's much more likely they will release windows 12 this year before 10 expires. with 2 major versions ahead they have an excuse to drop support for 10.
I would say that phone manufactures are still in the lead.
I run Mint LMDE6 on my machines, [I like mint but not the Ubuntu main edition] I also run MX and Parrot all Debian stable based
Windows 11 is not that awful, it's just that windows 10 is just as good and there is an awful lot of hardware out there that will run it that is still good. Microsoft is just trying to make money off of hardware ,and software upgrades, especially hardware
I think with a registry hack, you can make the older hardware work ok. Which is alright because the hardware that old wouldn't be worth that much anyway. If you can make them work ok then you have lost nothing and gained something.
