Mark Russinovich
CTO of Microsoft Azure and cofounder of Winternals.
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via Wikipedia: Mark Russinovich · see source
Mark Eugene Russinovich is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He cofounded Winternals Software, which Microsoft acquired in 2006, and is known for creating numerous Windows administration and diagnostic utilities including Autoruns, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView, and RootkitRevealer. He also discovered the Sony rootkit in 2005 and co-authored Inside Windows 2000.
Early life and education
Russinovich was born in Salamanca, Spain and raised in Birmingham, Alabama until age 15, when his family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a radiologist and his mother was a business administrator of his father's radiology practice.
He is of Croatian descent and grandson of diplomat Nikola Rušinović. Introduced to computers through a friend's father's Apple II in the 1970s, he reverse-engineered its ROM and wrote programs. At 15 he bought a TI-99/4A, and later an Apple II+ from his high school.
Career
From September 1994 to February 1996, Russinovich was a research associate at the University of Oregon's computer science department. He then worked at NuMega Technologies from February to September 1996 on performance-monitoring software for Windows NT. In 1996, he cofounded Winternals Software with Bryce Cogswell, serving as Chief Software Architect, and launched sysinternals.com, publishing utilities such as Autoruns, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView, and RootkitRevealer.
He was a consulting associate at OSR Open Systems Resources from September 1996 to September 1997, and a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center from September 1997 to March 2000. He joined Microsoft in 2006 upon its acquisition of Winternals. He co-authored Inside Windows 2000 and contributed to TechNet Magazine and Windows IT Pro magazine.
Works
In 1996, Russinovich found that by tweaking two Windows Registry entries in Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, the system could be tricked into acting like a Server edition, enabling BackOffice software installation; a worker thread protected those values, but the tool NT Tune later disabled the thread to make the changes. He created LiveKD, a tool that came with the book Inside Windows 2000. In 2005, he uncovered the Sony rootkit in Sony’s DRM software, which blocked users from copying their media.
The next year, he identified a rootkit in Symantec’s Norton SystemWorks, which Symantec promptly removed. He also examined the Windows Metafile flaw and determined it wasn’t an intentional backdoor. His techno-thriller novels include Zero Day (with a foreword by Howard Schmidt), Trojan Horse (with a foreword by Kevin Mitnick), and Rogue Code: A Novel (with a foreword by Haim Bodek). A short story, Operation Desolation, came out just before Trojan Horse.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Mark Russinovich (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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