About WDACManager

WDACManager was founded by Liviu Dunaev , a cyber security engineer with 25 years of enterprise infrastructure and security experience across Australia and New Zealand — and a deliberate, hands-on specialisation in Windows Defender Application Control.

Why WDACManager exists

Windows Defender Application Control (or ACfB) is, on paper, the most cost-effective path to Essential Eight Application Control compliance available to Australian organisations. In practice, the gap between what Microsoft ships and what an operations team can sustainably run is significant — policy authoring, event-driven tuning, audit-to-enforce transitions, and exception management consume disproportionate engineering effort.

WDACManager was built to close that gap. The platform reflects 25 years of disciplined infrastructure engineering and direct, in-the-trenches WDAC delivery across Australian government and not-for-profit organisations. It is not a theoretical product. Every workflow it automates is one that has been performed by hand, at scale, in production.

A career built on operational resilience

My career began in the resilience layer of enterprise IT. Through senior roles at EDS, Unisys, and IBM, I supported some of the largest backup and disaster recovery estates in the southern hemisphere — including a 6,500-server IBM TSM environment protecting 5PB of weekly data, and the migration of 5,000+ servers from on-premises to public and private cloud. I led datacenter migration programs across the banking and utilities industries, and delivered backup infrastructure for law enforcement, government, telecommunications, and manufacturing organisations.

That decade-plus in resilience engineering shaped a particular discipline: every control must survive contact with a real production environment, and "it works" is not a finished outcome.

A deliberate move into cyber security

In 2020, I moved fully into cyber security, focusing on the controls that determine whether an organisation can withstand a breach rather than merely detect one. Across consulting engagements spanning federal government, the not-for-profit sector, and technology consulting (auditing a Big Four Australian bank), I have:

• Designed and deployed Windows Defender Application Control in enforced mode across Windows estates, achieving Essential Eight Application Control Maturity Level 2 under the ACSC framework.
• Operationalised the full WDAC policy lifecycle — audit-mode baselining, event-driven tuning, trusted publisher and path-based rule design, and controlled transition to enforcement — without disrupting end-user productivity.
• Delivered enterprise allowlisting using Airlock Digital and Carbon Black, giving me a direct comparative view of how WDAC performs against commercial alternatives, and where its operational gaps sit.
• Implemented Microsoft Office macro restriction and user application hardening via Microsoft Intune.
• Led the strategic migration from CrowdStrike to the Microsoft Defender suite (Defender for Endpoint, Servers, and Identity), delivering substantial licensing savings and unified telemetry.
• Deployed FortiSIEM and Microsoft Sentinel across hybrid Azure environments.

Based in Melbourne. Built for Australian compliance realities.

WDACManager is operated from Melbourne, Victoria, with a clear focus on the operational requirements of Australian organisations working toward and sustaining Essential Eight maturity.