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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Windows has a hardcoded list of Microsoft domain names that entirely bypass the hosts file. I see nothing about this, so I would assume there is no countermeasure here. Curiously, this approach appears to have been tested as working anyway.

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Adguard Home running on a Raspberry Pi. Point your router at it for DNS, works like a charm.

Two years now, and it consistently blocks 48% to 54% of all the trash, including _all_ Microsoft domains.

Unless they just hardcode an IP to their DNS server of choice or even hardcode an IP to a specific Microsoft tracking host

Is there anyone maintaining a canonical list of such domains and hosts? This would be useful to add as firewall rules on a router upstream of any windows hosts, or to a pihole.

Here's one from a couple years back: https://petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specific-na...

AFAICT it has not changed.

Run say a linux firewall vm with PCI nic passthrough and give the host windows machine a virtio-pci/TAP interface as its network access is one countermeasure off the top of my head I can think of.

Agreed, running it inside a vm is how you would treat any other malware. Why pci passtrough instead of a regular virtio network driver though?

I'm imagining a situation where you need to run windows on the host, but you do not want windows itself arbitrating network access -- so you pass through the real NIC to the vm, and route through the vm with a virtio (I think TAP is actually the only option host-side though but still) NIC.

Ah, I see. Given that you can even pass disks, gpu's, usb devices etc via pci, I would always choose the opposite route: run windows in a vm.

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