Microsoft is having an “I told you so” moment this week as the security team behind Windows discovered that the zero-day exploits against which they pushed two security patches in November wouldn’t have worked on Windows 10 Anniversary Update anyway.
After the Windows Defender team tested how well the Anniversary Update edition of Windows 10 stood up against two critical zero-day exploits, one of which was used in October against organizations in the United States, they found that the robust operating system would have merely shown the attackers the Blue Screen of Death.
In addition to Windows 10 security, the team also found that features like AppContainer sandboxing and stronger validation methods on Microsoft Edge were able to block techniques that were commonly used to hack into systems.
This is great news for enterprise users still dragging their feet on Windows 10 adoption, because Microsoft is clearly saying that older versions of Windows may have been compromised had they been hit with either of the two zero-day exploits in question: CVE-2016-7255 and CVE-2016-7256.
Windows 7 users can currently use EMET, an exploit-mitigation toolset, to get the same security features, but support for EMET ends on July 13, 2018. That means users will necessarily have to move to Windows 10 when that support period ends, if they want continued protection.
We’ve said time and again that mass Windows 10 adoption is critical to the success of Microsoft’s many initiatives, and this validation of the new OS and its ability to fend off cyberthreats is a booster shot to getting higher adoption rates – at least in the commercial segment. 2017 will see much high adoption numbers, for several reasons, and enhanced Windows 10 security is merely one more entry on that list.
Microsoft is loading the Windows 10 Creators Update with some robust functionality, but it is also leveraging its security expertise to give it the kind of enterprise-level security layers that will push companies over the wall by incentivizing them to move to a Windows 10 environment.
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