Building Secure Defaults for Billions of Devices

Published December 15, 2024

How we ship secure defaults in Windows without breaking the world, and why quiet guardrails are the most effective ones.

By David Weston

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Laptop with security overlay graphics

Security wins rarely look glamorous. The most impactful changes land silently: stronger isolation, better sandboxing, and hardened policies that most users never notice.

When we shipped virtualization-based security and kernel attack surface reduction, we invested heavily in compatibility testing and staged rollouts. The pattern works:

  1. Ship off by default and learn. Collect crash data, watch for ecosystem blockers, and work with partners to close gaps.
  2. Turn it on for new devices first. Hardware baselines and updated drivers reduce risk.
  3. Make the default irreversible for the right cohorts. Once we have confidence, we lock in the secure path so it isn’t subject to drift.

Secure defaults aren’t a one-time switch; they’re a product lifecycle. Done well, they quietly protect billions of devices without asking users to become experts.