Windows Insider Podcast Ep 32: Defending Your Security

(Music)

JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast, where leaders from Microsoft and Windows Insiders discuss tech trends, careers, and innovation. I'm your host, Jason Howard.

This is Episode 32, Defending Your Security.

But first, if you're not yet a Windows Insider, head over to our website, insider.windows.com, and register for free. Insiders get access to upcoming Windows features before they're released to the public, plus exclusive opportunities to experience all Microsoft has to offer.

All right, on to the show.

This month, we're taking a look behind the scenes of how Microsoft security features are protecting your devices and privacy with Shweta Jha, a Senior Program Manager for Tamper Protection in the Windows Security suite of features. Without further ado, let's get onto the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Shweta. Thank you so much for joining us today.

SHWETA JHA: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me today.

JASON HOWARD: I'm glad you could be here. So, as we get started, can you tell Windows Insiders a little bit about yourself, and what you do here at Microsoft?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah, absolutely. So, as you know, my name is Shweta, and my official title is Senior PM. I work for the Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection team.

As far as the, you know, my role and my job, I think the way I would like to frame it is, my job is to basically develop security features that will help our customers to secure their involvement, their devices, and so on.

If I have to talk about the specific, you know, areas and ownership, I primarily look into blocking and containment capabilities. I’m also heavily invested in anti-tampering space, and recently, like around a year and a half, I’m also looking into hardware and firmware protection space.

JASON HOWARD: That is quite the scope of responsibility you have. My goodness.

Windows Insider Podcast Ep 32: Defending Your Security

SHWETA JHA: Yeah, Microsoft has great responsibilities for its customers, and we need to make sure that we are always on top of things.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So, reaching back in history a little bit, because I'm sure that there's some listeners out there who haven't necessarily kept up with Windows Security in recent years, can you tell us a little bit about how Windows Defender got started?

SHWETA JHA: Absolutely. So, it got started way back before I joined this team. (Laughter.) So, the journey was, like, around 17, 18, or maybe 19 years back. I don't exactly remember, but it all started with we, as Microsoft acquiring a product from a company called G Cat. The product’s name was Wrap, and it was basically an antispyware software that you can grab on your OS. So, that was the beginning of the journey.

And then, that continued. The threat landscape started changing, so we continued to change our product. So, in between we had SCEP. The product name was SCEP, which is Systems Center Endpoint Protection. That was also as add-on onto Windows OS. So, the antispyware tool transformed into SCEP.

And then, when we started looking into Windows 10 OS, the security became a more essential part. It was not, like, an add-on part. It’s integrated into, you know, whatever you do. So, it had to be integrated. So, we transformed a solution to make it part of the OS. And that's how Windows Defender Antivirus Solution was formed.

JASON HOWARD: That is awesome. And if-if I understand this correctly, and by all means, you are obviously the expert on this rather than me, does integrating this into the OS give it additional capabilities that it might not otherwise have if it was a standalone application?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah, absolutely. When you are running as a part of OS, definitely, you have much more control and much more privilege and optics to look through each and every piece of things that are happening on the network, go really deep into the kernel level of, you know, components and see through those. So, definitely it has much, much adage—added advantage.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So, looking at the current state of Windows Defender compared to the current versions of Windows, it’s obvious, you know, that there's been a lot of changes over the course of time, and you can see how the Windows Security suite has grown. So, can you dig in a little bit and tell us about the ways that we've expanded this to protect users, right?

I know you've highlighted this a little bit, but if there's more that you want to share, especially about, you know, the history of, like virus or malware protection, and then even onto things such

Windows Insider Podcast Ep 32: Defending Your Security

as firewall and network, the account protection, the family options that are available now. There's a whole suite that's available.

SHWETA JHA: Absolutely. So, here at Microsoft, and especially as part of Windows Defender, and now, actually, it's Microsoft Defender. (Laughter.) I should use the new term, Microsoft Defender, right, because we increased our footprint not only on a Mac and Windows devices, but also in a Linux and Android. Yay, I'm so proud of it! (Laughter.)

So, the development that has happened in several directions. So, one is enriching the capabilities to detect within the antivirus engine. So, that has, like, VM detector running, ML model having a cloud protection, and all. So, that is not very visible to the customer, but those are part of our engine, and we ensure that we are able to combat against the very advanced threat landscape.

Then, moving towards what additional things that we can do to ensure that customers and their devices are protected. So, then it comes as account protection, so protecting your identity. So, as part of account protection pillar, we introduced the feature called Windows Hello. That's-that’s a very interesting feature, and I would suggest every, you know, user to use that.

And then, if you look through the dynamic lock, I always use dynamic lock. I use Windows Hello. I don't even remember, at times, my password—(laughter)—because Windows always so seamless, so secure. Why would you not use it? Do you use Windows Hello, Jason?

JASON HOWARD: So, I have to say I'm guilty that I don't. I don't—I don't know why.

SHWETA JHA: (Laughter.) You should do it.

JASON HOWARD: (Laughter.) I think it's just, you know, the legacy throwback to, you know, just being comfortable typing in my password and whatnot. But, you know, I have to say that knowing what Hello is, I mean, obviously, this is definitely not the first time that I've heard of it. I don't—I don't really have a good answer for why I haven’t switched over. I don't know, maybe it's just—I don't really have a good excuse. (Laughter.)

SHWETA JHA: Okay, so, how about I tell you that you should try to switch to it? It's great. It's seamless. You are much more protected. You know, even if there is, like—if you use this, no one can steal your face, right? (Laughter.) And—

JASON HOWARD: (Laughter.) I hope not.

SHWETA JHA: So, it's very powerful, and I would definitely recommend everyone to use that. So, that's one piece.

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And then, on a firewall and network protection side, you make those features as by default for our consumers. So, that allows you to control the behavior of your inbound and output connection. And that's very much needed, specifically when you're in the situation of COVID where everyone is working from home or doing everything, using their devices. So, you have those tight of control over the firewall and network protection. So, I would highly recommend everyone to use that.

And then, in addition to that, it's like a continuous journey, right? So, if I see the most recent feature that we added into our pillar is stopping PUA. PUA is, like, potential unwanted apps. These are the files or applications that are not specifically malicious, but it's equally not good.

For example, if you have coin miner running on your device, then there would be very less CPUs I think available for anything that you do as part of your productivity, right? So, you would not want coin miner to run on your device. And what you could do is, like, just turn on this feature, and you are protected from such a presence.

And there are other options, as well. Like, we talk about Tamper Protection and many other features. But overall, if you look at, there is a very rich capabilities that we have provided, specifically for our home user to make sure that they can do their work in a very secure environment.

JASON HOWARD: Let me ask you about something that you mentioned, because I have to say that it's not something that I've necessarily spent time thinking about before, and that's the difference between, like, malware, which is in essence kind of an application doing bad things kind of behind the scenes—you may or may not know it's there, you may just see some of the side effects—versus the PUA, the potentially unwanted applications. How does Defender handle each of those? Like, is there a difference in how it responds to each one?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah, and that also depends upon, how do you classify any entities? So, if I have to classify—and-and it's all dependent on, you know, a lot of ML model that we run on a background.

So, if I have to classify a malware, so malware would be something like who goes into your device, tries to steal your password, tries to do some lateral movement, tried to gain persistence in your environment, and then tried to do the malicious activities, like it could be a ransomware that tries to lock your drive. It could be some other application who would start kind of making calls to command and control, and download more payloads to do more stuff, and do—and natural movement, and so on.

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So, those that are classified as malware, compared to PUA, which is, like, you have adware you don't want to see. It keeps popping, and it’s—you know, something is—even though it doesn't have a malicious intention, but it's, like, destructive all the same, because you have to kind of keep seeing it. And then, it does look through your additional resource cycles, and we really don't want the device to be having this.

JASON HOWARD: Gotcha. That's an interesting distinction. I mean, obviously, they're-they're both negative user experiences, but one of them is more of a—obviously a very malicious activity where there's potential loss of personal data and files and, you know, just—obviously, just information in general. And the other one seems to be more on the side of, okay, this is really annoying. I don't know how to get rid of it, and I just—I just don't want this to be happening.

SHWETA JHA: Absolutely, yes.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So, if I could jump backwards just a little bit, during your intro, you talked about the firmware side of things. And I want to dig in a little bit there, if I can. Knowing that Microsoft has made some big investments in hardware and in firmware protection, as well, can you explain a little bit about why that's needed in the current technology landscape?

SHWETA JHA: I think that's a great question, and I'm glad that you asked. So, as I was telling you that if you look at the threats landscape, it's like continuous threats evolving. (Laughter.) And the-the attackers are getting highly sophisticated, and they're trying to find new means to attack your environment. So, be it enterprise environment, or be it your home devices, they are always innovating new things.

So, what happened in the real past, we made a very secure environment for OS-level things. So, if you look at our antivirus solutions, almost all antivirus solutions, they have behavior monitoring, memory scanning, very advanced ML models, and so on. So, they’re getting better to detect these types of adversaries and attacks.

And in addition to that, if you’re an enterprise customer, there is another component called Endpoint Detection and Response. We call it EDR. And so, EDR is even much more powerful than antivirus, because it could look through your additional payloads, like networks and so on. So, they are even much more capable to look through the behavior detection.

So, when we made these solutions really powerful, then the attackers had to find new ways to adapt to your equipment. And they started looking into hardware and firmware level. So, they went beyond the OS, deep down into the hardware and firmware there. And also, because if you look at the growth in this particular area, and if you look at the number of vulnerabilities that we

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have in this particular area, that has been growing. So, attackers started looking into these weaknesses and started attacking into this space. So, that was one reason.

The other reason is if you're able to bypass, and if you are able to attack your hardware or firmware level, you gain control of everything. And these attacks are really, really bad. I mean, there could be a malware sitting with your firmware—we call it implants—and that persists. Even if you rebuild the system, it's there.

So, the-the risk has increased dramatically. There are more and more weaknesses coming up. Sometimes, it does happen that the configuration is not right. For example, though we give the recommendation to OEM, but sometimes those configurations are not followed. So, there are open holes in those, and those are getting, you know, exploited. And that's how there is a rise in the hardware and firmware-level attacks.

So, looking into this space, we were determined, and we wanted to do, you know, work in this particular area. So, there have been a lot of investments that are happening, and we can talk more about it.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of things that I want to say just from, you know, kind of some of the-the information that you've just shared. If we're providing some guidance to the OEMs, and they’re not following it. (Laughter.) Oh, that is not a good thing. (Laughter.) It's like we're giving them good advice. Hopefully, they would take it.

SHWETA JHA: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: Interestingly enough, on the—on the firmware side of things, so from what you’ve said, if you managed, as a user, to get some sort of malware virus that is attacking your machine at a lower level in the stacks with the hardware, the firmware level, and you realize something's happening to your device, and you're like, “You know what? I'm just going to go all out. I’m going to reinstall the operating system and start from scratch.” That doesn't necessarily fix that, does it?

SHWETA JHA: It doesn’t.

JASON HOWARD: Oh man. (Laughter.) So, how does the user make the determination of where it's actually at if they're not using Defender?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah. So, that's the tricky question, and there is absolute gap there. So, if I have to talk about, you know, going back again to our philosophy to provide a layered protection, so we tried to prevent. And that's why we launched Secure Core PC.

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Secure Core PC is the device that is meant to be secure, and it follows all the recommendations that we have given to OEM partners. It does follow the advanced features like Windows Defender System Guard, and it does ensure that your device is secured by default. So, that's like one level of protection that we are doing.

But now consider the population who does not have Secure Core PC, and in those cases, they are open for such attacks. So, there are two things there. One is the attack is happening, and then they don't know if the device had been attacked. So, here at Microsoft, we are working in two directions. First, to give them the visibility that, you know, your device is open. And then, if there is certain implant, then we tell them—we detect, and we’ll tell them that there is implant.

JASON HOWARD: So, we've covered a ton of ground here so far, and I've learned a few things, which is always fun, like I say in many episodes. It’s why I love doing this podcast, because I get to learn things about different Microsoft products that I don't always know.

Going back to kind of where your focus is, your main area of focus is Tamper Protection, which is another feature that's available to protect user security. So, can you share with us a little bit about what that is and how it works?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah. That's one of my, you know, favorite area, because I've been invested a lot into the anti-tampering space. So, we released this feature called Tamper Protection, and before I talk about what this feature does, let me give you a little bit background on why this feature was needed.

JASON HOWARD: Okay.

SHWETA JHA: So, as we have always been talking about, you know, the attacks we’re facing, we are talking about the threat landscape. So, if you analyze the behavior of those malwares, I think the way they do is, in most of these malwares, first, they target the defenders of the device, because once they are able to shut down Defender or switch off its essential features that is needed to protect your device, then they can gain control over anything pretty easily.

So, that’s their objective. They try to do that, and our objective is to make our solutions tamper- resistant. And there have been a lot of investment having in this direction. We have a CFA. We have other levels of, you know, protection capabilities that we introduced as part of service, but there was more needed to be done.

JASON HOWARD: If I can—if I can ask you real quick, what is a CFA?

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SHWETA JHA: CFA is Control Folder Access.

JASON HOWARD: Okay, okay.

SHWETA JHA: If- if you look into this space, basically what happens, and the way, you know, Windows philosophy was that if you are local admin on your device, you have got control of everything. You could actually do everything.

But this philosophy doesn't really work very well when the moderator or adversaries who has also gained control of, you know, admin on your device, because they could do pretty easily things that you don't want them to do.

JASON HOWARD: Sure.

SHWETA JHA: So, we came up with this feature, Tamper Protection. So, what it does is, once this feature is on, it goes into the shield-up mode. And-and it doesn't allow changes to its services or its essential settings like, you know, real-time protection or behavior monitoring, or other settings like cloud protection to go down. It just remains in that shield-up mode and protects your device.

The feature is by default on for all the consumers. So, you'll see that on your Windows Security app, you have this toggle, and that's turned on.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So, if a user did want to make changes to some of those settings that you called out, how does Tamper Protection understand the difference between potential malware or trying to act as an admin versus me acting as the admin, where I'm actually intentionally making a change?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah, that's a great question. So, it does allow the logic change, what we call it. So, the logic change is that, using the logger out. If you are on a UX, and you’re admin on a device, and you're changing from there, then we will allow you to do that.

But if—the way malware works is they use group policies. They use other Windows management interfaces, like PowerShell and all. So, if it is happening through those malicious, you know, behavior, then we know that it's not the logic user who is trying to change. And then, in those cases, we block it. And if it is a logic user through the UX, then we let them do the changes.

JASON HOWARD: Hold on, I want to take a moment to highlight that, because that is awesome. So, the software is smart enough to know whether or not I—you know, it's-it’s

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interpreting based upon the actions that are taking place that say, yes, there is a human sitting, likely at a keyboard in front of this device, who is using the UX, the shell, you know, the actual, you know, the settings panel, you know, whatever experience, to actually go through and make some of these configuration changes—they're adjusting sliders and things of that nature—versus something that's happening in a potentially scripted manner, you know, through PowerShell, as you mentioned, or whatnot, where it's just trying to write specific values without actually going through any of the proper interface to do so.

SHWETA JHA: Yes.

JASON HOWARD: That is fantastic. Y’all are smart. I love you guys. (Laughter.)

SHWETA JHA: Thank you so much. We are here to protect our customers. And I'm so proud of this feature. I mean, this was much, much needed.

JASON HOWARD: So, knowing all of this, right, all these different features and aspects of Defender, and all of this awesome technology that's there, right—we've covered a whole bunch here—for the average, at-home Windows user who may or may not know that any of this actually exists or that it's working on their behalf just by default, why does all of this matter? Why should they take the security of their devices so seriously?

SHWETA JHA: That's a great question, and before I answer to that, let me ask you this question. How many times you actually go to—you know, actually go to the market to do your shopping, and how time—how many times do you use your device to do online shopping?

JASON HOWARD: Oh, goodness. I think a lot of it has to do with what I'm shopping for. If it's groceries, I'm obviously doing that stuff in person. I haven't jumped on the online grocery shopping bandwagon yet, but if I'm—I don't know.

I-I spent time, you know, cleaning and washing and waxing my cars this weekend and, you know, like, the car soap I had bought in-store, but the wax I actually bought online. So, I will say it depends. But I do realize how much stuff I buy online. So, I'm just going to say 50/50. That was a long-winded answer, but probably half and half.

SHWETA JHA: Oh, that's great. And how about, let me ask you another question. How about your bank transactions? How many times do you visit your bank in a month? (Laughter.)

JASON HOWARD: (Laughter.) Given that my bank is not in-state, I go to a bank zero times a month. I have not been to an actual bank, oh my goodness… I think I've been to my bank once in the past 20 years. I'm not kidding by saying that. Like, it’s crazy. (Laughter.)

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SHWETA JHA: All right. So, I think you've got the answer, why do we need to ensure that our device needs to be secure. And this is very, very important. Actually, today, why because we all are trying to deal with COVID-19. Where we all are working from home, doing most of this stuff from home, sitting behind our desktop, laptops, and so on, and trying to do our day-to-day activities. So, it becomes utmost important to ensure that you have your security controls and knobs turned on.

Windows Defender provides you the great security solution, and it's inbuilt. Most of the feature comes by default on. But it also gives you the final control that you can, you know, add and control the behavior of your devices. So, I would suggest go ahead with the layered protection approach that you—that we provide to you and make sure that you have those options enabled and, you know, on.

The other thing. I would like to recommend all our users to see through, if you look at our shield, and there is this green icon. So, if the device is healthy, you would be able to see that, you know, that green icon there, which means that your device has all the necessary setting to-to secure your-your environment. So, make sure that that is turned on. And if it is yellow, make sure that you take necessary action to turn the knobs on, based on the recommendation that we provide.

So, these are the few basic things I would recommend all the users to do. It's not a, you know, very tricky. It’s straightforward, but it takes you a long way to having a safe and secure environment.

JASON HOWARD: And so, for our users who may not have seen that shield before or don't know how to navigate to it, if you look in the lower right corner of your Taskbar, at the bottom of your window screen, there's a little up arrow. You can click that, and if it's not already showing on the screen, the little panel will pop out where there's additional icons you can see. And the shield should be there. You can mouseover it. It'll give you a quick status update, or you can click the shield and it'll take you directly to those controls and settings, so you can make any adjustments along the way if you need to.

So, during the conversation, you've said something that caught my attention. And so, I want to ask a question about it.

SHWETA JHA: Go ahead.

JASON HOWARD: And it's been about the difference, I'm assuming, between consumer users—so, retail, you know, folks using their computers at home—versus your typical corporate enterprise-type environment where IT pros kind of live and breathe and make their living, right?

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There was—the conversation piece was about features that are enabled by default, things that are turned on automatically as part of this security sweep. So, it sounds like there's a difference between what type of install there is, whether it's a home or pro installation versus an enterprise installation.

So, digging in a little bit, because I know there's a ton of IT pros that are part of the Insider community, are there any security features that IT pros should go look for that kind of take it above and beyond what, you know, the retail or home and pro SKUs potentially have, so that, as they’re working to do a better job of securing their corporate environment, things that they can take advantage of?

SHWETA JHA: Absolutely. So, going back to the same philosophy to provide the layered protection and defense in depth, my recommendation would be to start looking—so, it all starts with you’re not reducing the attack surface, controlling the behavior off certain applications. So, going with that philosophy, I would recommend them to look through our attack surface reduction features, especially features like ASR rules.

JASON HOWARD: Okay.

SHWETA JHA: So, those rules are available, and the way you turn the rules on and the way you kind of control the behavior—so, let me give you an example. I'm sure everybody uses Office apps, and I’m sure, Jason, you do, too.

JASON HOWARD: Oh, absolutely. (Laughter.)

SHWETA JHA: Okay. So, when you use Office documents, say you have Excel. And then, in Excel, we do a lot of our, you know, day-to-day transaction and things like that. And we use macro, all of us, we do, right? So, we can’t really say that, oh, I would allow you to use, or you know, I want to use Excel, but I don't want to use macro. It's just not possible.

But what you can explicitly control is basically you can say that, okay, this is allowed. Opening Excel is allowed. Opening—having a macro is allowed. Having those macro call the logic application is allowed. But having those macro call some, you know, unwanted or malicious application is not allowed. And having those macro, you know, doing the process memory injection is not allowed.

So, if you go ahead with those kind of behavior controls, that would reduce the attack surface of your environment drastically. And I would highly recommend them to kind of start using those.

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JASON HOWARD: So, it sounds like it gives you a bit more granular control over some of the specific activities. So, rather than simply allowing all macros or disallowing all macros, like, yes, you can use macros, but here's some extra rules to follow to make sure you're behaving appropriately.

SHWETA JHA: Yes.

JASON HOWARD: That’s awesome.

SHWETA JHA: Yep.

JASON HOWARD: So, going back to the broader consumer space for just a moment, because there’s—there was one more question that I thought of that I wanted to ask you in this space, at what point did many of these features become on by default, right?

One of the things that we see is some lag time with users taking updates, or if there is some, you know, some, you know, installation scenarios where users may not receive an update immediately. With Defender being a core part of the OS now, we know that it's going to take some OS updates for Defender to get some of the changes that have occurred along the way.

So really, I guess the question is, is there anything that Defender does to help tell people, make sure you're staying up to date so that Defender can stay up to date?

SHWETA JHA: Yeah, that's-that's kind of a great question. And it all goes to the, having Defender wholly on your device. So, Defender has that intelligence inbuilt, where it could sense that if its updates are obsolete, or it has certain features that are not turned on, then it will go into the yellow mode. And that will allow you to take appropriate action.

So, by default, the updates and, you know, the features are on, on your device. But sometimes it may happen that your device is not able to reach to the Microsoft update and not able to get the latest updates. So, in those cases, then there is an inbuilt security that is there that tells you that, hey, you need to kind of make sure that your device is up to date.

So, my advice to the customers and user would be that keep looking into that and make sure that your Defender is wholly on the device.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. It seems like it becomes one big, virtuous cycle of just making sure you're staying updated, and we’ll help make sure that you stay secure along the way.

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SHWETA JHA: Yeah, absolutely, and keeping the feature—like, you asked two questions and the other question was, how do you ensure that all the features are, by default, on? So, I want to give a little bit of background.

When we release a new feature, it’s also, you know, a lot of responsibility on us to make sure that we release in a very graceful manner. We ensure that it doesn't break anything on your devices.

So, if I have to take an example of such a great feature, I would like to take the example of Tamper Protection, where I did gradual rollout, because I really have to see through that it is not breaking any obvious things. Why? Because it is hardening that stuff, right? And sometimes, when you harden things, there are things that the user is doing, and I really don't want them to kind of, you know, feel annoyed about it. So, I had to go really slow. It is a hundred percent, by default, on a device, but it took me like four or five months to kind of reach to that saturation point.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So, without getting yourself into any trouble, can you tell us a little bit about what's next? Like what should Insiders be on the lookout for in the coming months?

SHWETA JHA: I can't give you the exact details, but I can give you some hints.

JASON HOWARD: Okay.

SHWETA JHA: (Laughter.) So, as you see, even, for both consumer as well as enterprise, and I'm going to talk more about consumer here.

So, I think data is important. Your identity is very important. You don't want your identity to be kind of known on the dark web. Your device protection is very important. You working from home opens up a lot of different dynamics for attackers, so making sure that—maybe you’re working from home, your—all these things that I mention—your data, your identity, your device are protected. And also, there is a clear-cut segregation between your office data and your personal data, and so on.

So, these would be the areas that you would see more and more features coming in. And again, it's a journey, but those would be the target areas.

Along with that, I think hardware and firmware-level capabilities also would come. I recently released the feature called UEFI. UEFI is Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. That

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automatically scans your firmware and detects if there is any malware there. So, that feature got released. There will be more coming in, in the future.

JASON HOWARD: That's fantastic. It sounds like there's a bunch of cool stuff on the horizon. I totally understand why you can't say exactly what it is, right, especially in a secure space like this. You don't want to give away things ahead of time so that anybody with bad intentions tries to get ahead of you while they can.

But I appreciate you giving us a few hints, at least. It's always super fun to kind of get a little- little nugget of what's coming next. It makes it super fun. So, thank you for that.

SHWETA JHA: No, I appreciate. Thank you for asking. I think it's a great discussion.

JASON HOWARD: Well, as we wrap up here, are there any parting words of wisdom or anything else you'd like to share with the Insider audience?

SHWETA JHA: Keep your device up to date, always. It’s needed.

JASON HOWARD: That simple, right? Just stay up to date and let the rest take care of itself. (Laughter.)

SHWETA JHA: Absolutely. We will take care of everything for you.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for making the time to be here with us today. We really, really appreciate it. And again, we'll-we'll stay tuned to what's coming next.

SHWETA JHA: Thank you so much, Jason. It was really, really a pleasure talking with you and talking to our Insiders audience. Thank you very much.

JASON HOWARD: Thank you, Shweta.

(Music)

JASON HOWARD: And with that, Windows Insiders, this episode is a wrap. Thank you so much for joining us and taking a deeper look at the security of your Windows devices.

Before we leave you today, we want to take this opportunity to share something exciting for the program, which you may have already noticed. Last week, we launched a brand new Windows Insider website that's built on Microsoft's new, more accessible framework.

Windows Insider Podcast Ep 32: Defending Your Security

This was an important opportunity to align our site with improvements Microsoft is making across the board to both create a better and beautiful, user-friendly home for the program, as well as to better highlight all the ways you can engage not only with us, but with the Insider community as a whole, including amazing Windows Insiders who are changing the world. We also took this opportunity to really focus the site on the core of our program, flighting and giving feedback.

Currently, the site is only available in the en-us English language variant while we work to stand up new and improved translated versions of the site. So, thank you for your patience as we try to make this website work better for Insiders around the world.

That being said, if you do speak English, please do take a look and make sure that you’re flighting. We're also implementing new tools that will help us improve the site based upon how you are using it, so, the more you explore, the better. If you have any issues, reach out to us on our Twitter handle, @WindowsInsider.

Up next, we'll be renovating our Windows Insider Docs, so stay tuned to our website to keep seeing these improvements, new builds, Insider stories and more.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Join us for a new episode each month, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app. Until next time.

NARRATION: The Windows Insider Podcast is hosted by Jason Howard and produced by Microsoft Production Studios and the Windows Insider team, which includes Allison Shields, that's me, and Michelle Paison.

Listen to our previous podcasts and visit us on the web at insider.windows.com. Follow us @windowsinsider on Instagram and Twitter.

Support for the Windows Insider Podcast comes from Microsoft, empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Join us next month for another fascinating inside look into Microsoft, tech, innovations, careers, and the evolution of Windows.

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