Appendix A. About the Authors

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Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow in Windows Azure at Microsoft, working on Microsoft’s cloud operating system. He is the author of the cyberthriller Zero Day (Thomas Dunne Books, 2011) and coauthor of Windows Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference (Microsoft Press, 2011). Mark joined Microsoft in 2006 when Microsoft acquired Winternals Software, the company he cofounded in 1996, as well as Sysinternals, where he still authors and publishes dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities. He is a featured speaker at major industry conferences. Follow Mark on Twitter at @markrussinovich and on Facebook at http://facebook.com/markrussinovich.

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David Solomon, president of David Solomon Expert Seminars (www.solsem.com), has focused on explaining the internals of the Microsoft Windows NT operating system line since 1992. He has taught his world-renowned Windows internals classes to thousands of developers and IT professionals worldwide. His clients include all the major software and hardware companies, including Microsoft. He was nominated a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in 1993 and from 2005 to 2008.

Prior to starting his own company, David worked for nine years as a project leader and developer in the VMS operating system development group at Digital Equipment Corporation. His first book was entitled Windows NT for Open VMS Professionals (Digital Press/Butterworth Heinemann, 1996). It explained Windows NT to VMS-knowledgeable programmers and system administrators. His second book, Inside Windows NT, Second Edition (Microsoft Press, 1998), covered the internals of Windows NT 4.0. Since the third edition (Inside Windows 2000) David has coauthored this book series with Mark Russinovich.

In addition to organizing and teaching seminars, David is a regular speaker at technical conferences such as Microsoft TechEd and Microsoft PDC. He has also served as technical chair for several past Windows NT conferences. When he’s not researching Windows, David enjoys sailing, reading, and watching Star Trek.

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Alex Ionescu is the founder of Winsider Seminars & Solutions Inc., specializing in low-level system software for administrators and developers as well as reverse engineering and security training for government and infosec clients. He also teaches Windows internals courses for David Solomon Expert Seminars, including at Microsoft. From 2003 to 2007, Alex was the lead kernel developer for ReactOS, an open source clone of Windows XP/Server 2003 written from scratch, for which he wrote most of the Windows NT-based kernel. While in school and part-time in summers, Alex worked as an intern at Apple on the iOS kernel, boot loader, firmware, and drivers on the original core platform team behind the iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. Returning to his Windows security roots, Alex is now chief architect at CrowdStrike, a startup based in Seattle and San Francisco.

Alex continues to be very active in the security research community, discovering and reporting several vulnerabilities related to the Windows kernel, and presenting talks at conferences such as Blackhat, SyScan, and Recon. His work has led to the fixing of many critical kernel vulnerabilities, as well as to fixing over a few dozen nonsecurity bugs. Previous to his work in the security field, Alex’s early efforts led to the publishing of nearly complete NTFS data structure documentation, as well as the Visual Basic metadata and pseudo-code format specifications.