Mark Eugene Russinovich is CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of
software producers Winternals before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006.
Early life and education Russinovich was born in Salamanca, Spain
and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, until he was 15, when he
moved with his family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a
radiologist and his mother was a business administrator of his father's
radiology practice in Pittsburgh. Russinovich is of Croatian ancestry.
He was introduced to computers when his friend's father got an Apple II in the
1970s. He was able to reverse engineer its ROM and write programs for it. At
age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a TI99/4A. About six months
later his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it
upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIe's. He also wrote magazine articles
about Apple II. In 1989, Russinovich earned his Bachelor
of Science degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon
University, where he was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Beta Sigma chapter. The
following year he received a Master of Science degree in computer engineering
from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He later returned to Carnegie Mellon,
where he received a Ph.D. in computer engineering in 1994 with thesis titled
Application-transparent fault management under the supervision of Zary Segall.
Career From September 1994 through February
1996 he 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. In 1996, he and Bryce Cogswell cofounded
Winternals Software, where Russinovich served as Chief Software Architect, and
the web site sysinternals.com, where Russinovich wrote and published dozens
of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities including Autoruns,
Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView, and RootkitRevealer among many
others. From September 1996 through September
1997 he worked as a consulting associate at OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc., a
company 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. Russinovich joined Microsoft in 2006,
when it acquired Winternals Software. In his role as an author, he is a
regular contributor to TechNet Magazine and Windows IT Pro magazine on the
subject of the Architecture of Windows 2000 and was co-author of Inside Windows
2000. Russinovich is the author of many tools used by Windows NT and Windows
2000 kernel-mode programmers, and of the NTFS file system driver for DOS.
Works In 1996, Russinovich discovered that
altering two values in the Windows Registry of the Workstation edition of
Windows NT 4 would change the installation so it was recognized as a
Windows NT Server and allow the installation of Microsoft BackOffice
products which were licensed only for the Server edition. The registry key
values were guarded by a worker thread to detect tampering, and later a program
called NT Tune was released to kill the monitor thread and change the values.
In 2005, Russinovich discovered the Sony rootkit in Sony DRM products. Its
function was to prevent users from copying their media.
In January 2006, Russinovich discovered a rootkit in Norton SystemWorks by
Symantec Corporation. Symantec directly removed the rootkit. He also analyzed
the Windows Metafile vulnerability and concluded that it was not a deliberate
backdoor. This possibility had been raised – albeit tentatively – by Steve
Gibson after a cursory investigation of the nature of the exploit and its
mechanism. Russinovich's novels Zero Day and Trojan
Horse were published by Thomas Dunne Books on March 15, 2011 and September 4,
2012. Both are in a series of popular techno-thrillers, that have attracted
praise from industry insiders such as Mikko Hypponen and Daniel Suarez. A
short story, Operation Desolation was published just before Trojan Horse and
takes place 1 year after the events of Zero Day. Book 3, Rogue Code: A Novel
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. Bibliography
Computer books Solomon, David; Russinovich, Mark.
Inside Microsoft Windows 2000. Microsoft Press. ISBN 0-7356-1021-5.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David. Microsoft Windows Internals. Microsoft
Press. ISBN 0-7356-1917-4. Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David;
Ionescu, Alex. Microsoft Windows Internals. Microsoft Press. ISBN
0-7356-2530-1. Russinovich, Mark; Margosis, Aaron.
Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Microsoft Press. ISBN
0-7356-5672-X. Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David;
Ionescu, Alex. Microsoft Windows Internals, Part 1. Microsoft Press. ISBN
0-7356-4873-5. Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David;
Ionescu, Alex. Microsoft Windows Internals, Part 2. Microsoft Press. ISBN
0-7356-6587-7. Novels
Zero Day: A Novel. Thomas Dunne Books. March 15, 2011. ISBN 0-312-61246-X.
Operation Desolation: A Short Story. Thomas Dunne Books. August 7, 2012. ASIN
B0080K37P2. Trojan Horse. Thomas Dunne Books.
September 4, 2012. ISBN 9781250010483. Rogue Code. Thomas Dunne Books. May 20,
2014. ISBN 9781250035370. Articles
"Inside NT's Object Manager". Windows IT Pro. October 1997.
"Inside NT's Scheduler Part 1". Windows IT Pro. July 1997.
"Inside NT's Scheduler Part 2". Windows IT Pro. August 1997.
"NT vs.UNIX: Is One Substantially Better". Windows IT Pro. December 1998.
"Inside Encrypting File System, Part 1". Windows IT Pro. June 1999.
"Inside Encrypting File System, Part 2". Windows IT Pro. June 1999.
"Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 1". TechNet Magazine. February 2007.
"Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2". TechNet Magazine. March 2007.
"Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 3". TechNet Magazine. April 2007.
"Inside Windows Vista User Account Control". TechNet Magazine. June 2007.
"Inside Windows 7 User Account Control". TechNet Magazine. 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. References
External links Official website
Official blog 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 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