Windows 11 Upgrade Row Reveals Microsoft Ransomware Red Herring
Remember back in 2015 when Microsoft ‘developer evangelist’ Jerry Nixon now famously stated that “Windows 10 is the last version of Windows” at the Microsoft Ignite conference that year? If not, maybe you recall how the company called it “the most secure Windows ever” just before it launched that same year? Guess what? The first statement hasn’t aged well, with Windows 11 now looking likely for release in October.
Microsoft is also beating the Windows 11 security drum and beating it hard by talking up how it features the strongest protection against malware yet. However, it’s the claim that Windows 11 will “raise the security baseline” to protect against ransomware that has got many infosecurity professionals scratching their collective heads.
The great Windows 11 TPM kerfuffle
Before we get to the Windows 11 ransomware red herring, let’s deal with the security stink that been wafting around social media and tech forums since the hardware requirements for running the next-generation Windows operating system were revealed, shall we?
Yes, I’m talking about the great TPM kerfuffle. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a hardware requirement for running Windows 11, specifically TPM 2.0, which replaced the previous TPM 1.2 standard in 2019, hence the online anger over needing to upgrade your computer to upgrade the OS.
An uproar which isn’t totally justified as Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos, says, “TPM 2.0 is available to almost all hardware at no real cost these days as it has built into nearly all Intel and AMD processors for many years now.”
What’s more, if you have a TPM 1.2 chip, this can likely be upgraded to TPM 2.0 by way of a firmware update from the computer vendor at no cost, rather than requiring a new hardware module to be purchased and installed.
Although Microsoft has withdrawn the somewhat controversial, because of the lack of detailed information it provided to users, Windows 11 compatibility checker at the moment, it’s easy enough to find out if you have the TPM 2.0 component required to run Windows 11. Open device…