Extremely promising Windows security hardening tool: HotCakeX

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The colors and GIFs are a lot to take in lol. Does look interesting, however it does seem to sacrifice some privacy in the name of security for a handful of settings.

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haha that was my first reaction too.

Yes that definitely is the case as she’s basically just following all of Microsoft’s recommendations. Either way, still a great repo.

Windows by default is secure and safe

Doesn’t sandbox your apps by default

mfw. No it isn’t…

I love the design of this tool tho, very unique and pretty.

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I disagree with that statement too lol.

Compared to what?

It’s a security tool, not a privacy tool, so it makes sense.

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Android/ChromeOS. An OS isn’t ‘secure by default’ if any program that is executed has full access to user data and/or can do whatever it wants to the system. Also, to my knowledge, there is no way other than virtualisation to securely sandbox windows apps. Preventing sandbox escapes require blacklisting some widely used syscalls which in turn breaks lots of common programs. Linux sandboxing is much better.

Let’s not turn this into another broad desktop OS discussion please.

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There is also BeerIsGood who has both Windows and macOS hardening guides. It also has a link to this one and mentions that it provides more hardening and is better maintained.

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Did you try this script?

yeah it works nicely.

Oh awesome! Did you do all the categories? It seems the script turns on a lot of potential things that would hurt privacy? Or am I mistaken?

I messed around with it in a VM and tried all the categories for the lols.

That’s true, a lot of the settings can compromise your privacy. I would recommend reading through what each option does before deciding if you should enable it or not.

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