RunAs Radio

How has patching changed in 2026? Richard chats with patching goddess Susan Bradley about what she's seeing in vendor patches and how they're affecting consumers and businesses. On one hand, you have the security risk of unpatched servers, which puts a lot of pressure on sysadmins to deploy patches immediately. And, at the same time, the number of patches has grown massively as tools like Anthropic's Fable have revealed far more vulnerabilities. Then there are the vendors that are slow to get fixes out for drivers and firmware for existing systems, increasing the risk of serious failures - it's not easy patching in 2026!

Links

UEFI Secure Boot with Richard Hicks

Reassess your Windows Update Policies

Dell Hotfix

HP Bitlocker Loop

Suspend BitLocker Protection

End of Support for Office 2016 and 2019

Recorded Aug 21, 2026

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) was deprecated in Sept 2024 - when does it go away? Richard talks to Adam Marshall about how WSUS is still an essential service for Configuration Manager, included with Server 2025 and V.Next - it's not going anywhere! Adam talks about the use cases WSUS covers that no other update solution does, especially granular control of updates and offline scenarios. And while Microsoft is still feeding updates into the WSUS stack, no new code is going into the solution, making it hard to maintain. That is why Adam has been building WAM - WSUS Automated Maintenance. The stack includes free and paid tools, and all of them make your WSUS life easier!

Links

Windows Server Update Services

Microsoft Intune

Windows Update for Business

Configuration Manager

Windows Autopatch

WSUS Automated Management

Recorded Aug 20, 2026

How does AI change the intranet? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her work helping organizations build great intranets and how tools like M365 Copilot are changing the intranet. Susan talks about the new reality of an intranet, where some users no longer go to the intranet directly but use an agent to retrieve the information they need. This impacts search statistics, but also means it's important to write pages that an agent can easily understand. The conversation also dives into the bane of all intranets - archiving data. LLMs can help with organizing data, but getting stale data out of view is essential. There are also retention policies and governance, and there's a role for these tools there too - the intranet is evolving!

Links

SharePoint Skills

Recorded Aug 17, 2026

How secure are your PowerShell scripts? Richard talks to Mike O'Neill about the powerful security features introduced with PowerShell 7.3 and above, including session configuration files and clean blocks. Mike talks about how some organizations are strict about installing anything on servers, including the latest version of PowerShell - which is one of the reasons 5.1 has persisted so long. But that ends with 26H2 and opens the door to securing your PowerShell with strict controls over accounts, cmdlets, and more! The latest PowerShell makes it easier to have just enough administration - and makes it harder for the black hats to exploit!

Links

PowerShell 7

Just Enough Administration

New-PSSessionConfiguration File

PowerShell Clean Block

Monthly PowerShell Team Call

Mike's Exchange Add-In for PowerShell

Recorded July 9, 2026

What if Microsoft Defender not only detected attackers - but also fought back? Richard talks to Liz Tesch about Microsoft Defender Automatic Attack Disruption and Predictive Shielding. Liz talks about how attacks are often detected before the payload executes, but by the time humans can respond, far more damage has been done. Automatic Attack Disruption acts immediately on detection to limit the attacker by locking accounts, restricting access on a compromised server, and more. Predictive Shielding goes a step further by limiting attackers' ability to respond to the disruption by turning off GPO changes, disabling safe mode, and otherwise interfering with the typical actions that attackers take once they know they have been detected. Add AI to the mix, and everything gets more complicated. The black hats are using AI to attack, and Microsoft Defender XDR is using it to defend - the race is on!

Links

Microsoft Defender XDR

Automatic Attack Disruption

Predictive Shielding

Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Defender for Identity

Automatic Attack Disruption EBook

Web Scale Graph Mining for Cyber Threat Intelligence Research Paper

Local AI Agent Discovery with MDE

Threat Hunting in Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Defender for XDR Preview

New Features for MDE

Recorded June 29, 2026