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.
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]
From September 1994 through February 1996, Russinovich was a research associate with the University of Oregon's computer science department. From February through September 1996 he was a developer with NuMega Technologies, where he worked on performance-monitoring software for Windows NT.[6]
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.
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 SonyDRM products, whose function was to prevent users from copying their media.[6]
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
Solomon, David; Russinovich, Mark (September 16, 2000). Inside Microsoft Windows 2000 (Third ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN 0-7356-1021-5.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David (December 8, 2004). Microsoft Windows Internals (Fourth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN 0-7356-1917-4.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David; Ionescu, Alex (June 17, 2009). Microsoft Windows Internals (Fifth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN 978-0-7356-2530-3.
Russinovich, Mark; Margosis, Aaron (July 12, 2011). Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Microsoft Press. ISBN 978-0-7356-5672-7.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David; Ionescu, Alex (April 5, 2012). Microsoft Windows Internals, Part 1 (Sixth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN 978-0-7356-4873-9.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David; Ionescu, Alex (October 2, 2012). Microsoft Windows Internals, Part 2 (Sixth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN 978-0-7356-6587-3.
Russinovich, Mark; Margosis, Aaron (October 17, 2016). Troubleshooting with the Windows Sysinternals Tools. Microsoft Press. ISBN 978-0-7356-8444-7.
Novels
Zero Day: A Novel. Thomas Dunne Books. March 15, 2011. ISBN 978-0-312-61246-7.
Operation Desolation: A Short Story. Thomas Dunne Books. August 7, 2012. ISBN 9781466821552.
Trojan Horse. Thomas Dunne Books. September 4, 2012. ISBN 9781250010483.
Rogue Code. Thomas Dunne Books. May 20, 2014. ISBN 9781250035370. Archived from the original on May 30, 2014. Retrieved May 30, 2014.
Articles
"Inside NT's Object Manager". Windows IT Pro. Penton. October 1997. Archived from the original on October 11, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
"Inside NT's Scheduler Part 1". Windows IT Pro. Penton. July 1997. Archived from the original on April 12, 2013.
"Inside NT's Scheduler Part 2". Windows IT Pro. Penton. August 1997. Archived from the original on April 12, 2013.
"NT vs. UNIX: Is One Substantially Better". Windows IT Pro. Penton. December 1998. Archived from the original on October 24, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
"Inside Encrypting File System, Part 1". Windows IT Pro. Penton. June 1999. Archived from the original on October 11, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
"Inside Encrypting File System, Part 2". Windows IT Pro. Penton. June 1999. Archived from the original on October 11, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
"Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 1". TechNet Magazine. Microsoft. February 2007. Archived from the original on November 18, 2008. Retrieved March 30, 2007.
"Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2". TechNet Magazine. Microsoft. March 2007. Archived from the original on March 31, 2007. Retrieved March 30, 2007.
"Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 3". TechNet Magazine. Microsoft. April 2007.
"Inside Windows Vista User Account Control". TechNet Magazine. Microsoft. June 2007.
"Inside Windows 7 User Account Control". TechNet Magazine. Microsoft. July 2009.
Videos
"Advanced Malware Cleaning". Windows Sysinternals. Microsoft. November 2006.
"Mysteries of Windows Memory Management Revealed, Part 1 of 2". Channel 9. Microsoft. October 2010.
"Mysteries of Windows Memory Management Revealed, Part 2 of 2". Channel 9. Microsoft. October 2010.
"Cloud Security Video: Public Cloud Security: Surviving in a Hostile Multitenant Environment – Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure". IP EXPO Europe. Imago Techmedia. October 2014. Archived from the original on October 11, 2017. Retrieved July 19, 2017.
Referencesedit
^ ab"LiveKd - Windows Sysinternals". March 23, 2021.
^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.
^"Interview with Mark Russinovich by Microsoft Student Partners". YouTube. Archived from the original on December 21, 2021. Retrieved April 15, 2012.
^"Mark Russinovich". Making it Big in Software. Making it Big Careers Inc. Archived from the original on December 18, 2010. Retrieved February 13, 2011.
^Russinovich, Mark Eugene (1994). Application-transparent fault management (Thesis). ProQuest 304086659.
^ abc"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.
^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.
^Turner, Suzi (January 11, 2006). "Symantec confesses to using rootkit technology". ZDNet. CBS Interactive. Retrieved November 6, 2012.
^"Symantec Norton Protected Recycle Bin Exposure". Security Response. Symantec. January 10, 2006. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
^Russinovich, Mark (January 16, 2006). "Rootkits in Commercial Software". Mark Russinovich's Blog. Winternals. Archived from the original on May 13, 2013. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
^Russinovich, Mark (January 19, 2006). "Inside the WMF Backdoor". Mark Russinovich's Blog. Winternals. Retrieved March 13, 2013.
^Steve Gibson (January 12, 2006). "grc.news.feedback newsgroup". 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.
^ abcRussinovich, Mark (March 15, 2011). Zero Day: A Novel. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0312612467.
^Trojan Horse: A Novel. Thomas Dunne Books. September 4, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
^Operation Desolation: A Short Story. Thomas Dunne Books. August 7, 2012. Retrieved June 1, 2014.
^Russinovich, Mark (2014). Rogue Code: A Novel. Jeff Aiken series. foreword by Haim Bodek (son of American physicist Arie Bodek). Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 978-1250035370. Archived from the original on November 24, 2017. Retrieved November 29, 2017.
External linksedit
Official website
Video interview with Mark in his office at Microsoft on TechNet Edge
Mark's public event/session videos on Microsoft IT's Showtime! by TechNet[permanent dead link]
Appearance on The Stack Exchange Podcast, Nov 11, 2011
Original Article on Sony's rootkit
Inside the WMF backdoor
Windows Sysinternals Tools written by Mark Russinovich
Interview with Scott Hanselman about Zero Day and Trojan Horse, 26 July 2012