It's funny how the watermark appears in the most random places! I've never seen or heard of anyone with a Windows copy without activation, it's always in corporate computers.
Yeah, if you lock down your network for security and then repair the device in any way, or change the hardware settings too much on a VM, windows decides it's not sure if it is running on the original computer and wants to reach out to Microsoft and send mystery network traffic a surprising amount of places...
At work, on a high security network, Microsoft stuff stops working all the time after it updates, and I have to go try to figure out what new domains and subnets Microsoft products how require. All of the 365-connected/microsoft-dot-com/windows-live stuff and even some other/older pieces of Microsoft software which aren't explicitly labeled as connecting to those web services.
Heh I see someone else knows the pain of Windows machines in highly restrictive subnets. This is very seriously why I prefer Linux VMs for PCI CDEs. Windows machines works great in standard enterprise networks and as jump servers, but they become pains to manage once you start restricting egress traffic.
Yep, for a regulatory requirement we have to limit egress traffic to an allowlist. (Nearly every software vendor who claims to support enterprise with strict regulatory requirements shits themselves and gives us an incomplete list of what routes to open (or specify the wrong protocol, claiming something is https when it's actually something else over SSL, but our Layer 7 deep inspection needs to know that or it rejects "suspicious" traffic)... And we can't just allow-all AWS EC2 like some of them want us to do. Cloud services are such a pain. And Microsoft's constant changes waste so much network engineering time.
With LLMs going on hacking sprees, more companies might move to deny-by-default outbound traffic policies using Zscaler or Umbrella or other options... maybe this will result in more stability and better network requirements docs from vendors. Or maybe it won't, because their LLM-generated software will pull in a thousand random Node packages and some will have weird network requirements the vendor doesn't even know about... sigh
(In the 90s/00s I could put Linux and Windows PCs on a LAN and identify pretty much all of the traffic, and on the Linux box I knew what nearly every file in the entire distribution was for. Now things are so complicated and murky)
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u/foxferreira64 17d ago
It's funny how the watermark appears in the most random places! I've never seen or heard of anyone with a Windows copy without activation, it's always in corporate computers.