Mark Eugene Russinovich (born December 22, 1966) is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before Microsoft acquired it in 2006.
He was introduced to computers when his friend's father got an Apple II in the 1970s. He reverse-engineered its ROM program and wrote programs for it. At age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a TI-99/4A. About six months later, his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIes. He also wrote magazine articles about Apple II.[3]
From September 1994 through February 1996, Russinovich was a research associate with the University of Oregon's computer science department. From February through September 1996 he was a developer with NuMega Technologies, where he worked on performance-monitoring software for Windows NT.[6]
From September 1996 through September 1997, he was a consulting associate at OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc., based in Amherst, New Hampshire. From September 1997 through March 2000, he was a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, researching operating system support for Web server acceleration and serving as an operating systems expert.[6]
Russinovich joined Microsoft in 2006 when it acquired Winternals.
In 1996, Russinovich discovered that altering two values in the Windows Registry of the Workstation edition of Windows NT 4.0 changed the installation so it was recognized as a Windows NT Server and allowed the installation of Microsoft BackOffice products which were licensed only for the Server edition.[7] The registry key values were guarded by a worker thread to detect tampering; later, a program called NT Tune was released to kill the monitor thread and change the values.
Russinovich wrote LiveKD, a utility included with the book Inside Windows 2000. As of 2022, the utility is readily available to download.[1]
In 2005, Russinovich discovered the Sony rootkit in SonyDRM products, whose function was to prevent users from copying their media.[6]
Russinovich's novels Zero Day (foreword by Howard Schmidt)[13] and Trojan Horse (foreword by Kevin Mitnick) were published by Thomas Dunne Books on March 15, 2011 and September 4, 2012, parts of a series of popular techno-thrillers that have attracted praise from industry insiders such as Mikko Hyppönen and Daniel Suarez.[13][14] A short story, "Operation Desolation",[15] was published just before Trojan Horse and takes place one year after the events of Zero Day. Book 3, Rogue Code: A Novel (Jeff Aiken Series, May 2014) deals with vulnerabilities of the NYSE. It has a foreword by Haim Bodek, author of The Problem of HFT: Collected Writings on High Frequency Trading & Stock Market Structure Reform.[13][16]
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David; Ionescu, Alex (June 17, 2009). Microsoft Windows Internals (Fifth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN978-0-7356-2530-3.
Russinovich, Mark; Margosis, Aaron (July 12, 2011). Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Microsoft Press. ISBN978-0-7356-5672-7.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David; Ionescu, Alex (April 5, 2012). Microsoft Windows Internals, Part 1 (Sixth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN978-0-7356-4873-9.
Russinovich, Mark; Solomon, David; Ionescu, Alex (October 2, 2012). Microsoft Windows Internals, Part 2 (Sixth ed.). Microsoft Press. ISBN978-0-7356-6587-3.
^"Mark Russinovich". Making it Big in Software. Making it Big Careers Inc. Archived from the original on December 18, 2010. Retrieved February 13, 2011.
^Russinovich, Mark Eugene (1994). Application-transparent fault management (Thesis). ProQuest304086659.
^Russinovich, Mark (2014). Rogue Code: A Novel. Jeff Aiken series. foreword by Haim Bodek (son of American physicist Arie Bodek). Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN978-1250035370. Archived from the original on November 24, 2017. Retrieved November 29, 2017.