Windows 10: Root Cause Analysis - System Reboot - v1809 (Windows Server 2019)

Malitz · Jun 8, 2021

Hi all, Thanks in advance for any responses. My OS is actually Windows Server 2019 Essentials, however I am looking for general troubleshooting guidance related. ########## SYMPTOM ########## OS Reboots when NVMe SSD begins experiencing heavy write activity. ######### ERRORS ######### After this symptom occurs, I see this error in my BIOS (before the OS loads). "GPT header corruption has been detected, please check SATA mode setting in BIOS Setup, or you can use (Boot Sector(MBR/GPT) Policy) item under (Boot Configuration) page to recovery GPT header." If I can change the related BIOS setting to "Auto Recovery", then this message disappears after a reboot, but it does not prevent the reboot symptom from occurring. ########### HARDWARE ########### MOBO: Asus ROG XIII Maximus Hero OS SSD: Corsair Force GT 180TB M2: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB CPU: i9-11900k ######### NOTES ######### - The symptom triggers when I start a heavy write to the NVMe drive. It does not occur if I perform the same write operations to a HDD. Any suggestions on what to look at would be appreciated.

:)

Ahhzz · Jun 8, 2021

Office 2019

Only supported on Win10. Sorry, 8.1 users, only 4 years old, gotta go.

Microsoft Office 2019 will only work on Windows 10

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...-to-office-and-windows-servicing-and-support/

Spoiler Office 2019
Last year at Ignite, we announced Office 2019 – the next perpetual version of Office that includes apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and Skype for Business) and servers (including Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business). Today we’re pleased to share the following updates:

Office 2019 will ship in H2 of 2018. Previews of the new apps and servers will start shipping in the second quarter of 2018.

Office 2019 apps will be supported on:

Any supported Windows 10 SAC release

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018

The next LTSC release of Windows Server

The Office 2019 client apps will be released with Click-to-Run installation technology only. We will not provide MSI as a deployment methodology for Office 2019 clients. We will continue to provide MSI for Office Server products.

Brink · Jun 8, 2021

VulnScan - Automated Triage & Root Cause Analysis of Memory Corruption

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) receives reports about potential vulnerabilities in our products and it’s the job of our engineering team to assess the severity, impact, and root cause of these issues. In practice, a significant proportion of these reports turn out to be memory corruption issues. In order to root cause these issues, an MSRC security engineer typically needs to analyze the crash and try to understand what went wrong. This workflow isn’t unique to externally reported vulnerabilities; vulnerabilities that are discovered internally through fuzzing and variant investigation are also typically memory corruption issues and these need to be triaged and assessed for exploitability too.

For these reasons, MSRC has made significant investments over the course of many years to build tooling that helps us automate the root cause analysis process. VulnScan is a tool designed and developed by MSRC to help security engineers and developers determine the vulnerability type and root cause of memory corruption bugs. It is built on top of two internally developed tools: Debugging Tools for Windows (WinDbg) and Time Travel Debugging (TTD).

WinDbg is Microsoft's Windows debugger that has recently received a user interface makeover to make it even easier to use. You can find more information about the new WinDbg Preview version here.

Time Travel Debugging is an internally developed framework that records and replays execution of Windows applications. This technology was released during CPPCon 2017.

By leveraging WinDbg and TTD, VulnScan is able to automatically deduce the root cause of the most common types of memory corruption issues. Application Verifier’s mechanism called PageHeap is used to trigger an access violation closer to the root cause of the issue. The analysis starts from the crash location and progresses towards the root cause. Classes of memory corruption issues supported by VulnScan:
Click to expand...

Read more: VulnScan - Automated Triage and Root Cause Analysis of Memory Corruption Issues Defense

Brink · Jun 8, 2021

Security baseline (DRAFT) for Windows 10 v1809 and Windows Server 2019

Microsoft is pleased to announce the draft release of the security configuration baseline settings for Windows 10 version 1809 (a.k.a., “Redstone 5” or “RS5”), and for Windows Server 2019. Please evaluate these proposed baselines and send us your feedback via blog comments below.

Download the content here: Windows-10-1809-Security-Baseline-DRAFT.zip

The downloadable attachment to this blog post includes importable GPOs, a PowerShell script for applying the GPOs to local policy, custom ADMX files for Group Policy settings, documentation in spreadsheet form and as a Policy Analyzer file (MSFT-Win10-v1809-RS5-WS2019-DRAFT.PolicyRules). In this release, we have changed the documentation layout in a few ways:

MS Security Baseline Windows 10 v1809 and Server 2019.xlsx – multi-tabbed workbook listing all Group Policy settings that ship in-box with Windows 10 v1809 or Windows Server 2019. Columns for “Windows 10 v1809,” “WS2019 Member Server,” and “WS2019 DC” show the recommended settings for those three scenarios. A small number of cells are color-coded to indicate that the settings should not be applied to systems that are not joined to an Active Directory domain. Cells in the “WS2019 DC” columns are also highlighted when they differ from the corresponding cells in the “WS2019 Member Server” column. Another change from past spreadsheets is that we have combined tabs that used to be separate. Specifically, we are no longer breaking out Internet Explorer and Windows Defender AV settings into separate tabs, nor the settings for LAPS, MS Security Guide, and MSS (Legacy). All these settings are now in the Computer and User tabs.

BaselineDiffs-to-v1809-RS5-DRAFT.xlsx – This Policy Analyzer-generated workbook lists the differences in Microsoft security configuration baselines between the new baselines and the corresponding previous baselines. The Windows 10 v1809 settings are compared against those for Windows 10 v1803, and the Windows Server 2019 baselines are compared against those for Windows Server 2016.

Windows 10 1803 to 1809 New Settings.xlsx – Lists all the settings that are available in Windows 10 v1809 that were added since Windows 10 v1803. (We used to highlight these settings in the big all-settings spreadsheets.)

Server 2016 to 2019 New Settings.xlsx – Lists all the settings that are available in Windows Server 2019 that were added since Windows Server 2016. (We used to highlight these settings in the big all-settings spreadsheets.)

Highlights of the differences from past baselines, which are listed in BaselineDiffs-to-v1809-RS5-DRAFT.xlsx:

The MS Security Guide custom setting protecting against potentially unwanted applications (PUA) has been deprecated, and is now implemented with a new setting under Computer Configuration\...\Windows Defender Antivirus.

We have enabled the “Encryption Oracle Remediation” setting we had considered for v1803. At the time we were concerned that enabling the newly-introduced setting would break too many not-yet-patched systems. We assume that systems have since been brought up to date. (You can read information about the setting here and here.)

Changes to Virtualization-Based Security settings (used by Credential Guard and Code Integrity):

“Platform Security Level” changed from “Secure Boot and DMA Protection” to “Secure Boot.” If system hardware doesn’t support DMA protection, selecting “Secure Boot and DMA Protection” prevents Credential Guard from operating. If you can affirm that your systems support the DMA protection feature, choose the stronger option. We have opted for “Secure Boot” (only) in the baseline to reduce the likelihood that Credential Guard fails to run.

Enabled the new System Guard Secure Launch setting which will enable Secure Launch on new capable hardware. Secure Launch changes the way windows boots to use Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and Runtime BIOS Resilience features to prevent firmware exploits from being able to impact the security of the Windows Virtualization Based Security environment.

Enabled the “Require UEFI Memory Attributes Table” option.

Enabled the new Kernel DMA Protection feature described here. The “External device enumeration” policy controls whether to enumerate external devices that are not compatible with DMA-remapping. Devices that are compatible with DMA-remapping are always enumerated.

Removed the BitLocker setting, “Allow Secure Boot for integrity validation,” as it merely enforced a default that was unlikely to be modified even by a misguided administrator.

Removed the BitLocker setting, “Configure minimum PIN length for startup,” as new hardware features reduce the need for a startup PIN, and the setting increased Windows’ minimum by only one character.

Enabled the new Microsoft Edge setting to prevent users from bypassing certificate error messages, bringing Edge in line with a similar setting for Internet Explorer.

Removed the block against handling PKU2U authentication requests, as the feature is increasingly necessary.

Removed the configuration of the “Create symbolic links” user rights assignment, as it merely enforced a default, was unlikely to be modified by a misguided administrator or for malicious purposes, and needs to be changed to a different value when Hyper-V is enabled.

Removed the deny-logon restrictions against the Guests group as unnecessary: by default, the Guest account is the only member of the Guests group, and the Guest account is disabled. Only an administrator can enable the Guest account or add members to the Guests group.

Removed the disabling of the xbgm (“Xbox Game Monitoring”) service, as it is not present in Windows 10 v1809. (By the way, consumer services such as the Xbox services have been removed from Windows Server 2019 with Desktop Experience!)

Removed Credential Guard from the Domain Controller baseline. (Credential Guard is not useful on domain controllers and is not supported there.)

Created and enabled a new custom MS Security Guide setting for the domain controller baseline, “Extended Protection for LDAP Authentication (Domain Controllers only),” which configures the LdapEnforceChannelBinding registry value described here.

The Server 2019 baselines pick up all the changes accumulated in the four Windows 10 releases since Windows Server 2016.

We have replaced the collection of .cmd batch files for applying the baselines to local policy with a single PowerShell script that takes one of these five command-line switches to indicate which baseline you want to apply:.\BaselineLocalInstall.ps1 -Win10DomainJoined - for Windows 10 v1809, domain-joined
.\BaselineLocalInstall.ps1 -Win10NonDomainJoined - for Windows 10 v1809, non-domain-joined
.\BaselineLocalInstall.ps1 -WS2019Member - for Windows Server 2019, domain-joined
.\BaselineLocalInstall.ps1 -WS2019NonDomainJoined - for Windows Server 2019, non-domain-joined
.\BaselineLocalInstall.ps1 -WS2019DomainController - for Windows Server 2019, domain controller
A couple of important notes about using the BaselineLocalInstall.ps1 script:

PowerShell execution policy must be configured to allow script execution. You can configure this with a command line such as the following:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

LGPO.exe must be in the Tools subdirectory or somewhere in the Path. LGPO.exe is part of the Security Compliance Toolkit and can be downloaded from this URL:
https://www.microsoft.com/download/d....aspx?id=55319

Windows 10 v1809 has greatly expanded its manageability using Mobile Device Management (MDM). The Intune team is preparing documentation about the Microsoft Windows MDM security baseline and how to use Intune to implement the baseline, and will publish it very soon. We will post information to this blog when that happens.
Click to expand...

Source: Security baseline (DRAFT) for Windows 10 v1809 and Windows Server 2019 Microsoft Security Guidance blog

Download: Windows-10-1809-Security-Baseline-DRAFT.zip

Windows 10: Root Cause Analysis - System Reboot - v1809 (Windows Server 2019)

Root Cause Analysis - System Reboot - v1809 (Windows Server 2019)

Root Cause Analysis - System Reboot - v1809 (Windows Server 2019)

Root Cause Analysis - System Reboot - v1809 (Windows Server 2019)

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