Microsoft Defender Application Control

Translating Windows Defender Application Control Policy Wizard sliders to Windows Defender Application Control policy options

by

This week is a short post focussed on Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC). More specifically, this short post is focussed on the different policy rules that can be configured by using the Windows Defender Application Control Policy Wizard. That policy wizard is an an open-source Windows desktop application written in C# and bundled as an MSIX package. It provides IT administrators with a user-friendly method for creating, edditing and merging WDAC policies. The WDAC policy wizard relies on the ConfigCI PowerShell cmdlets and that makes sure that the output of the policy wizard is identical to using the cmdlets manually. WDAC is genarally used to control what runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices. That is achieved by setting policies that specify whether a …

Read more

Deploy Microsoft Defender Application Control policies without forcing a reboot

by

This week is all about Microsoft Defender Application Control (MDAC). More specifically, about configuring MDAC policies on Windows 10 devices by using Microsoft Intune without forcing a reboot. MDAC, often still referred to as Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC), restricts application usage by using a feature that was previously already known as configurable Code Integrity (CI) policies. To make the history lesson complete, configurable CI policies was one of the two main components of Windows Defender Device Guard (WDDG). History aside, CI policies help with protecting Windows 10 devices by checking apps based on the attributes of the code signing certificates and the app binaries, the reputation of the app, the identity of the process that initiated the installation (managed installer) and the path from …

Read more