Mark Russinovich Joins Microsoft

If you develop Windows applications you’ve probably used ProcessExplorer, RegMon, and FileMon (a lot) and you no doubt have a copy of Windows Internals on your bookshelf. Well today the author of both, Mark Russinovich, announced he’s joining Microsoft. Why post about it here? Two reasons. I took a week long training class on Windows Internals given by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon a couple of years ago and after class one day I was talking to Mark about his tools at Sysinternals and I mentioned that I didn’t understand why Microsoft hadn’t bought his company given his depth of understanding of the Windows operating system he’d be quite an asset - so I get one point for calling it. The other reason I mention this here is to remind myself, and anyone else that’s interested, to go and download every single tool on the Sysinternals web site, because once the acquisition is finalized the Microsoft Security team will review each of the tools to see if they are fit for public distribution from a security perspective and my initial hunch is that the tools in their current form will no longer be publicly available. So get ‘em now.