Microsoft has introduced plans to periodically take away legacy drivers from the Home windows Replace catalog to mitigate safety and compatibility dangers.
“The rationale behind this initiative is to make sure that we’ve got the optimum set of drivers on Home windows Replace that cater to quite a lot of {hardware} gadgets throughout the home windows ecosystem, whereas ensuring that Microsoft Home windows safety posture shouldn’t be compromised,” Microsoft mentioned.
“This initiative includes periodic cleanup of drivers from Home windows Replace, thereby leading to some drivers not being provided to any techniques within the ecosystem.”
As the corporate defined on Thursday, the primary part of this “cleansing up” process will contain drivers with newer replacements already printed on Home windows Replace.
On this context, cleanup refers to expiring drivers by eradicating their affiliation with an viewers in Home windows Replace and thus stopping them from being provided to any Home windows system. This can be carried out by deleting the expired driver’s viewers assignments within the {Hardware} Improvement Heart.
Microsoft will begin by eradicating legacy drivers and can later broaden to incorporate extra classes that may be eliminated to extend safety. Nonetheless, companions should still republish drivers eliminated by Microsoft throughout this periodic clean-up course of if they’ll present a justifiable enterprise cause.
“Microsoft eradicating legacy drivers from Home windows Replace is a proactive measure to safeguard safety and enhance driver high quality for Home windows customers,” Redmond added.
“Shifting ahead, count on this cleanup to be a routine apply, and put together for the introduction of recent publishing pointers that may assist all home windows customers maintain their techniques in a safe and dependable state.”
In Might, Microsoft additionally introduced modifications to pre-production driver signing prompted by certificates authorities (CAs) set to run out in July and the retirement of Home windows Metadata and Web Providers (WMIS) and gadget metadata.
Moreover, earlier this week, the corporate unveiled new safety defaults for Home windows 365 Cloud PCs and up to date safety defaults for all Microsoft 365 tenants in July to dam entry to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Workplace information utilizing legacy authentication protocols.
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