Microsoft details its latest ransomware blocking feature

[HEXUS]

Controlled Folder Access in Windows 10 FCU prevents access to your important files.

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[Biscuit]

Sounds like a pretty nice feature to have on.

[shaithis]

Simple and effective. Makes you wonder why we didn't have it a long time ago.

[bitbucket]

Isn't this what UAC is supposed to do?

[Tabbykatze]

Great idea, except a lot of malware code cave legitimate trusted apps to do their dirty work

[Wrinkly]

Had to manually add Office 2016 (64bit) applications to the exclusions.

[Tabbykatze]

Isn't this what UAC is supposed to do?

No, UAC is just a priviledge check for administrative requirements.

[Jonj1611]

Isn't this similar to what Bitfenix has? Even though that was a bit irritating with a pop up when something wrote to the documents folder, ie games

[DevDrake]

Simple and great

[TheAnimus]

Had to manually add Office 2016 (64bit) applications to the exclusions.

Why the heck did such a profitable company axe so much of their QA? I guess because the competition didn't ever bother with QA.

[peterb]

Why the heck did such a profitable company axe so much of their QA?

Greed, complacency and a pinch of arrogance.

[ByteMyAscii]

Isn't this what UAC is supposed to do?

UAC is less about specific folder access but more about higher privileges. Folders such as your personal documents wouldn't require escalated privileges to access, so UAC would not prevent Ransomware encrypting those.

[Wolfclaw]

Doesn't come with an approved whitelist of apps, so everything is initially flagged, even the big packages, Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop etc etc, will be a major pain and will no doubt put of a lot of users, good idea badly implemented, even the popup alert doens't give you the option to add it to whitelist, something a basic firewall has done for decades, 5/10 Microsft you must try harder !!

[badass]

Why the heck did such a profitable company axe so much of their QA? I guess because the competition didn't ever bother with QA.

Microsoft does not talk to microsoft. i.e. windows and office teams don;t have the best relationship. Empire building and point scoring is far more important than decent products.

[TheAnimus]

Greed, complacency and a pinch of arrogance.

I think it's because the CEO came from the world of competing against google, who have truly awful to non existent QA.

It's a shame because 5 years ago, MS's QA was excellent. I think they saw it as something that wasn't valued.

[badass]

I think it's because the CEO came from the world of competing against google, who have truly awful to non existent QA.

It's a shame because 5 years ago, MS's QA was excellent. I think they saw it as something that wasn't valued.

No, It was never excellent. It was never even good. They probably stopped releasing "Service Packs" for windows because people would always wait for service pack one before considering deploying anything from Microsoft.

They never needed to have good QA. Microsoft pioneered releasing unfinished rubbish to their customers at a time when software was generally good quality on release, then when everyone else noticed that didn't hurt their bottom line, everyone else followed suit. Now all software is complete junk on release.