Comment by ryandrake

17 hours ago

You basically have to treat all components of Windows as malware. Your personal threat model needs to include Microsoft as an attacker.

I have a Windows VM with net access (through a consumer VPN) that I install software in, make sure it's all up to date and whatnot. To do any real work I then take a snapshot and run it on its own VLAN with the only reachable thing being my own samba server.