Mark Russinovich

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Mark Russinovich
Russinovich at PDC 2010, October 2010
Born (1966-12-22) December 22, 1966 (age 57)
Salamanca, Spain
OccupationCTO of Microsoft Azure
EmployerMicrosoft
Known forCo-founder of Winternals Software and Sysinternals.com; LiveKd[1]
Websitemarkrussinovich.com

Mark Eugene Russinovich (born December 22, 1966) is a Spanish-born American

software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals
before Microsoft acquired it in 2006.

Early life and education

Russinovich was born in

business administrator of his father's radiology practice in Pittsburgh. Russinovich is of Croatian descent.[2]

He was introduced to computers when his friend's father got an Apple II in the 1970s. He reverse-engineered its ROM program and wrote programs for it. At age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a TI-99/4A. About six months later, his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIes. He also wrote magazine articles about Apple II.[3]

In 1989, Russinovich earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Beta Sigma chapter.[citation needed] The following year he received a Master of Science degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He later returned to Carnegie Mellon, where he received a Ph.D. in computer engineering in 1994[4] with the thesis Application-Transparent Fault Management[5] under the supervision of Zary Segall.

Career

From September 1994 through February 1996, Russinovich was a research associate with the

NuMega Technologies, where he worked on performance-monitoring software for Windows NT.[6]

In 1996, he and

Bryce Cogswell cofounded Winternals Software, where Russinovich served as Chief Software Architect, and the web site sysinternals.com, where Russinovich wrote and published dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities including Autoruns, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView, and RootkitRevealer
.

From September 1996 through September 1997, he was a consulting associate at OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc., based in Amherst, New Hampshire. From September 1997 through March 2000, he was a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, researching operating system support for Web server acceleration and serving as an operating systems expert.[6]

Russinovich joined Microsoft in 2006 when it acquired Winternals.

As an author, Russinovich is a regular contributor to

kernel-mode programmers, and the NTFS file system driver for DOS
.

Works

In 1996, Russinovich discovered that altering two values in the Windows Registry of the Workstation edition of Windows NT 4.0 changed the installation so it was recognized as a Windows NT Server and allowed the installation of Microsoft BackOffice products which were licensed only for the Server edition.[7] The registry key values were guarded by a worker thread to detect tampering; later, a program called NT Tune was released to kill the monitor thread and change the values.

Russinovich wrote LiveKD, a utility included with the book Inside Windows 2000. As of 2022, the utility is readily available to download.[1]

In 2005, Russinovich discovered the Sony rootkit in Sony DRM products, whose function was to prevent users from copying their media.[6]

In January 2006, Russinovich discovered a

Symantec. Symantec immediately removed the rootkit.[8][9][10] He also analyzed the Windows Metafile vulnerability and concluded that it was not a deliberate backdoor.[11] This possibility had been raised—although tentatively—by Steve Gibson after a cursory investigation of the nature of the exploit and its mechanism.[12]

Russinovich's novels Zero Day (foreword by Howard Schmidt)[13] and Trojan Horse (foreword by Kevin Mitnick) were published by Thomas Dunne Books on March 15, 2011 and September 4, 2012, parts of a series of popular techno-thrillers that have attracted praise from industry insiders such as Mikko Hyppönen and Daniel Suarez.[13][14] A short story, "Operation Desolation",[15] was published just before Trojan Horse and takes place one year after the events of Zero Day. Book 3, Rogue Code: A Novel (Jeff Aiken Series, May 2014) deals with vulnerabilities of the NYSE. It has a foreword by Haim Bodek, author of The Problem of HFT: Collected Writings on High Frequency Trading & Stock Market Structure Reform.[13][16]

Computer books

Novels

Articles

Videos

References

  1. ^ a b "LiveKd - Windows Sysinternals". March 23, 2021.
  2. ^ Martinović, Ratko (October 28, 2012). "Loš PR u dijaspori – Koje su svjetski poznate osobe podrijetlom Hrvati, a da to niste ni znali" [Bad PR in the Diaspora – What are the world famous people of Croatian descent, and that you did not even know]. Dnevno.hr (in Croatian). Archived from the original on October 30, 2012. Retrieved November 27, 2012.
  3. ^ "Interview with Mark Russinovich by Microsoft Student Partners". YouTube. Archived from the original on December 21, 2021. Retrieved April 15, 2012.
  4. ^ "Mark Russinovich". Making it Big in Software. Making it Big Careers Inc. Archived from the original on December 18, 2010. Retrieved February 13, 2011.
  5. ProQuest 304086659
    .
  6. ^ a b c "Affidavit of Mark Russinovich in Support of Plaintiffs' Motion for Final Approval of Class Action Settlement" (PDF). United States District Court Southern District of New York. SonySuit.com. April 2, 2005.
  7. ^ Andrew Schulman (September 16, 1996). "Differences Between NT Server and Workstation Are Minimal". O'Reilly and Associates. Archived from the original on April 11, 2018. Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  8. CBS Interactive
    . Retrieved November 6, 2012.
  9. Symantec. January 10, 2006. Archived from the original
    on October 26, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  10. Winternals. Archived from the original
    on May 13, 2013. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  11. Winternals
    . Retrieved March 13, 2013.
  12. Gibson Research Corporation. Archived from the original
    on February 21, 2013. Retrieved November 6, 2007. The only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn is that this was a deliberate backdoor put into all of Microsoft's recent editions of Windows.
  13. ^
    ISBN 978-0312612467
    .
  14. ^ Trojan Horse: A Novel. Thomas Dunne Books. September 4, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  15. ^ Operation Desolation: A Short Story. Thomas Dunne Books. August 7, 2012. Retrieved June 1, 2014.
  16. ISBN 978-1250035370. Archived from the original
    on November 24, 2017. Retrieved November 29, 2017.

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Russinovich&oldid=1216098302"