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Windows IT Pro Blog
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DCOM authentication hardening: what you need to know

David_Zhu's avatar
David_Zhu
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 19, 2022
Hardening represents a means of investigating and reducing the number of systems across your organization with potential weaknesses, and then taking steps to securing them from malicious actors and t...
Updated Oct 19, 2022
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security
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McIntoshA's avatar
McIntoshA
Copper Contributor
Feb 22, 2023

David_Zhu 

We have a lot of OPC interfaces which use DCOM and have configured the DCOM authentication to use Packet Integrity for both the OPC Server and Client computers.

However we are seeing the Event ID 10036 errors in the System event log on the OPC Client computer. Is this what you would expect? The article indicates that these are server events but we are seeing them on the client computer even when we have configured DCOM to use Packet Integrity on both computers. 

We are assuming that this means that when the DCOM hardening patch is applied on either computer that the data flow between the 2 computers will stop working. 

We have found that if Windows updates are applied to the OPC Server computer or if the version of Windows 10 Pro (1909) used on the OPC Server computer is upgraded to a supported version of Windows 10 Pro (22H2) these 10036 errors will stop and don't understand why. Can you explain why this would stop the 10036 error events on the OPC Client? 

We have some OPC Servers which are running on Windows OS which are no longer getting windows updates, e.g. Windows 7 or 2008 Server and will be difficult to upgrade due to the running applications and location of the computers.