RunAs Radio

The original Secure Boot certificate expires in June 2026! Richard talks to Richard Hicks about how Secure Boot works and how the expiration of the master certificate can leave PCs vulnerable to boot-related malware, such as rootkits. Richard discusses recent Microsoft communications on SecureBoot and how to check which certificate your machines have. Workstations using managed updates are likely already up to date, but servers are a different issue. When the certificate expires, you'll no longer receive updates to Secure Boot for known exploits, leaving your machines vulnerable. Update today!

Links

Secure Boot Certificates Expiring

Sony Rootkit Scandal

Secure Boot Playbook for Windows Client

Windows Update Management

Registry Key Updates for Secure Boot

Richard's Blog Post on Secure Boot EUFI Certificates Expiring

Get-UEFICertificate in PowerShell Gallery

Recorded March 9, 2026

What does a production-grade large language model look like? While at NDC Sydney, Richard talked with Vaishnavi Gudur from Microsoft about her work scaling LLMs for Teams transcriptions, summaries, and more! Vaishnavi discusses the underlying complexities of operating the Teams LLM infrastructure for a large array of customers across different countries and regulatory regimes. Data sovereignty also plays a large role: different countries have specific rules on where data must reside and how it can be accessed. As the scale increases and the tail gets longer, the rules set gets more complex! Lots of great thinking about what LLMs look like in a production environment.

Links

Transcripts in Microsoft Teams

Recorded April 24, 2026

How secure is your Active Directory infrastructure? While at Zero Trust World in Orlando, Richard chatted with Spencer Alessi about his work helping companies secure Active Directory, making it more difficult for black hats to exploit it for lateral moves during a breach attempt. Spencer talks about the increasing speed of these exploits, making it much harder to block them after the fact, so it's best to make AD too difficult to target. Jake Hildreth's Locksmith tools are a great place to start - free and open source. There are also Microsoft tools and Spencer's own AD Security Resource Kit to help evaluate your AD infrastructure and lock it down!

Links

Locksmith

Enhanced Security Admin Environment

Active Directory Security Resource Kit

Recorded March 4, 2026

There's competition in the Office productivity space! Richard chats with Sharon Weaver about her experiences with M365 Copilot and Anthropic's Claude Cowork to improve information worker productivity. Sharon talks about the confusion around all the different copilots in the Microsoft space - including the chat tools, research agents, and more. But when it comes to helping with an Excel spreadsheet, M365 Copilot can't do what Claude Cowork can do. Sharon talks about describing the goals of a spreadsheet to Claude Cowork and having the tool generate the spreadsheet, make corrections, and add formatting. Cowork has similar capabilities for presentations, and with the Connector library, new functionality is being added routinely. There's some competition in the AI productivity space - things are getting interesting!

Links

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork Connectors

Copilot in PowerPoint

Recorded February 24, 2026

What does the world look like after Microsoft Deployment Toolkit? Richard talks to MDT creator Michael Niehaus about the life and death of MDT. Michael talks about his early days at Microsoft, when he created a better way to manage operating system images so you can build and rebuild Windows PCs for your organization. But MDT had been in maintenance since 2013, without specific support for Windows 11. And now, some security concerns have ended support entirely. So what happens next? Michael offers fixes to keep MDT safe to use, and some alternatives if you want to keep managing your own images!
Links
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
Michael's Post of the MDT Vulnerability
Windows Autopilot
Friends of MDT
MDT Retirement Notice
Microsoft Intune
2Pint DeployR
MMS Conference
iPXE Anywhere
Recorded February 17, 2026