Group Policy Blog by Darren Mar-Elia (The “GPOGUY”)
Windows Management History, Part 2: Automation Grows Up (2005–2011)
Check the beginning of the story here. By 2005, things were changing quickly. DesktopStandard was acquired by Microsoft, and I went from watching the future unfold from the outside to helping build it from the inside. Walking into Microsoft felt like stepping onto a...
Tattooing Windows with Microsoft Intune
Tattooing has been part of Windows configuration management for decades. In the Group Policy world, tattooing occurred when a policy wrote a value but didn’t remove it when the policy no longer applied. The result was familiar to anyone who has supported Windows...
Windows Management History, Part 1: When Monad Quietly Lit the Fuse
In the early 2000s, Windows administration was a patchwork of tools that never quite agreed with each other. MMC snap‑ins behaved like they were built by different teams on different planets. VBScript was powerful but brittle. Command‑line tools spoke in wildly...
How to Disable Group Policy Processing… on Purpose?
I have to say that after 25 years of messing around with Group Policy, I am constantly amazed by the new things I still learn about the technology and its behavior. Especially when those things are substantial and weird. Such was my recent experience when a colleague...
The Stryker Breach: A Wake-Up Call for Change Management, Privilege Management and Zero Trust
The recent cyberattack on the Stryker Corporation has created chaos through healthcare and cybersecurity sectors. Beginning on March 11, 2026, the incident disrupted global operations, manufacturing, and surgical schedules. This wasn't a standard ransomware play; it...
Understanding Group Policy “Tattooing”
If you’ve worked with Group Policy for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the term 'registry tattooing'. The concept dates back to NT 4.0 System Policies, for those Windows veterans who remember it. Tattooing occurred when a registry-based policy applied a...
Understanding Group Policy Storage and Structure
Group Policy uses a complex, at times inconsistent, model to store configured settings in a Group Policy Object (GPO). This stems from the historical development of Group Policy. While a central team at Microsoft built the Group Policy infrastructure, individual...
When Malware Abuses Group Policy
It's been a while since I've addressed this topic. Something like 9 years to be exact. But for sure, the problem of malware leveraging Group Policy to propagate itself is still very much alive. In the original article, an IT friend of mine mentioned something he saw...
Managing Windows Services Using Group Policy
On Twitter/X I saw a thread about managing Windows Services using Group Policy. The poster talked about using the setting area under Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\System Services to control Windows Service startup settings (e.g.,...
Mastering GPUpdate: Best Practices for Group Policy Refresh
Anyone who manages Group Policy (GP) knows about the gpupdate.exe utility that ships with Windows. GPUpdate’s job is to refresh Group Policy manually, rather than relying on Windows to do it on its own schedule. Specifically, it can be used to force the system to ask...