Heya folks, Ned here again. Many years ago, we made configuring SMB signing in Windows pretty complicated. Then, years later, we made it even more complicated in an attempt to be less complicated. To...
Updated Nov 09, 2023
Version 14.0
Blog Post
For Ned's statement "it's been the default for 20+ years" perhaps 1 small side note: Windows 2000 Server DCs have by default an enabled SMB signing for the SMB server (so not required, as this is the case with WS03+ DCs), but as all SMB clients supporting SMB signing (Windows 98 & Windows NT 4.0 SP3 and higher, with a backport for the former 2) have SMB signing enabled by default, this indeed means SMB signing is effectively on by default for the scenario described above and this for more than 20 years already. For what it's worth of course, as Windows 2000 Server, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 shouldn't be ubiquitous anymore nowadays 🙂 (on the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if they still show up in some environments :-)).
Ciao,
Pedro