Cybersecurity

Microsoft: Improved security features are delaying hackers from attacking Windows users

Constant security improvements to Microsoft products are finally starting to pay off dividends, a Microsoft security engineer revealed last week.

Speaking at the BlueHat security conference in Israel, Microsoft security engineer Matt Miller said that widespread mass exploitation of security flaws against Microsoft users is now uncommon --the exception to the rule, rather than the norm.

Miller credited the company's efforts in improving its products with the addition of security-centric features such as a firewall on-by-default, Protected View in Office products, DEP (Data Execution Prevention), ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), CFG (Control Flow Guard), app sandboxing, and more.

These new features have made it much harder for mundane cybercrime operations to come up with zero-days or reliable exploits for newly patched Microsoft bugs, reducing the number of vulnerabilities exploited at scale.