Windows Server 2025 Security Baseline 2602: Ten More Ways to Stop You From Crying When You Get Pwned

Oh joy of fucking joys, Microsoft has graciously vomited forth Security Baseline 2602 for Windows Server 2025, presumably because the previous baselines weren’t quite enough to stop you incompetent bastards from turning your domain controllers into a Bitcoin farm for eastern European teenagers.

Ten new settings. That’s ten more group policy objects that you’ll ignore until some auditor waves a compliance checklist under your nose, at which point you’ll blindly enable them all during production hours and wonder why your shitty legacy application that requires SMBv1 and cleartext passwords suddenly keels over and dies.

Let’s see what delights await us in this steaming pile of security theater. There’s Credential Guard requirements, because apparently encrypting credentials is a novel fucking concept in 2025. Then there’s LSASS protection, given that you morons can’t stop clicking on “Invoice.pdf.exe” attachments from “totally-legit-not-russian@badmalware.com”. Oh, and SMB encryption defaults—because Microsoft finally realized that transmitting data across your flat network in plaintext is about as secure as writing passwords on the toilet walls.

There’s Defender application control nonsense in there too. You know, the antimalware that’ll consume 90% of your CPU during business hours because some arsehat decided to scan every single file on your 20TB file server simultaneously. And authentication protocol restrictions that’ll break that one critical server running Server 2003 that Gary from Accounting swears he still needs for his “vital spreadsheets”—which turns out to be nothing but a pirated copy of Doom II.

The baseline includes PowerShell Constrained Language Mode too, which means half your “certified” admins will suddenly discover they can’t run their dodgy GitHub scripts that randomly delete user profiles “to improve performance.” Cue the helpdesk tickets: “The server is broken, I can’t run my magic cleanup script!” No shit, sherlock, that’s the fucking point.

But let’s be honest. You’ll download these baselines, glance at them, mutter “seems fine,” deploy them to Test, have them break something minor, then disable them all and go back to running with administrative privileges and passwords like “Summer2025!” because “security is hard” and “users need convenience.” Then you’ll act all surprised when you find LockBit having a field day with your HR database.

Deploy these settings. Test them properly. Or don’t. I don’t give a flying fuck. I’ll be here watching the fireworks when your CEO asks why the entire company’s data is being auctioned on the dark web. Pass the popcorn.

Original article: https://4sysops.com/archives/windows-server-2025-security-baseline-2602-10-new-settings/

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I once had a luser complain that implementing these “new security things” made his computer slower. Investigation revealed he had seventeen browser toolbars, three fake antivirus programs, and a screensaver that was literally just a keylogger with pretty fish animations. When I explained that the security baseline had actually prevented the screensaver from phoning home to Mother Russia, he whined that he “really liked those fish.” I disabled his account for two days and told him the fish were dead. He didn’t complain about the security settings again.

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