Microsoft Buys Sysinternals

Microsoft announced today that it has aquired Sysinternals and Winternals. If you go to Winternals.com, you can see it has already been changed to show Microsoft has taken over. Sysinternals is still the same, but it slow right now. This is the home site for Mark Russinovich, who discovered that SonyBMG was using a rootkit on some of it's music discs last year.

Sysinternals offers many free tools and programs for Windows like Process Explorer, Regmon, and Autoruns. These programs have been used by many security people to provide better alternatives to Windows built in tools. Process Explorer for example provides far more information and options than the built in task manager of Windows. Autoruns was used as part of a way to disable the daily phoning home of Windows WGA tool in this example.

As of right now, all of the programs can still be downloaded, but whether they can be in the future is uncertain.