The security threat landscape
Today’s security threat landscape is one of aggressive and tenacious threats. In previous years, malicious attackers mostly focused on gaining community recognition through their attacks or the thrill of of temporarily taking a system offline. Since then, attacker’s motives have shifted toward making money, including holding devices and data hostage until the owner pays the demanded ransom. Modern attacks increasingly focus on large-scale intellectual property theft; targeted system degradation that can result in financial loss; and now even cyberterrorism that threatens the security of individuals, businesses, and national interests all over the world. These attackers are typically highly trained individuals and security experts, some of whom are in the employ of nation states that have large budgets and seemingly unlimited human resources. Threats like these require an approach that can meet this challenge.
In recognition of this landscape, Windows 10 Creator's Update (Windows 10, version 1703) includes multiple security features that were created to make it difficult (and costly) to find and exploit many software vulnerabilities. These features are designed to:
- Eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities
- Break exploitation techniques
- Contain the damage and prevent persistence
- Limit the window of opportunity to exploit
The following sections provide more detail about security mitigations in Windows 10, version 1703.
