Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority, President Brad Smith testified to Congress on Thursday, promising that security will be “more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, “has taken on the responsibility personally to serve as the senior executive with overall accountability for Microsoft’s security,” Smith told Congress.
His testimony comes after Microsoft admitted that it could have taken steps to prevent two aggressive nation-state cyberattacks from China and Russia.
According to Microsoft whistleblower Andrew Harris, Microsoft spent years ignoring a vulnerability while he proposed fixes to the “security nightmare.” Instead, Microsoft feared it might lose its government contract by warning about the bug and allegedly downplayed the problem, choosing profits over security, ProPublica reported.
This apparent negligence led to one of the largest cyberattacks in US history, and officials’ sensitive data was compromised due to Microsoft’s security failures. The China-linked hackers stole 60,000 US State Department emails, Reuters reported. And several federal agencies were hit, giving attackers access to sensitive government information, including data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, ProPublica reported. Even Microsoft itself was breached, with a Russian group accessing senior staff emails this year, including their “correspondence with government officials,” Reuters reported.
Microsoft focused on security at this point is like a builder focusing on building strong foundations now that the house is built on top.
It’s a little too late my dudes.
I remember them saying all the same exact things in the early 2000s after a slew of widespread disasters. Security will never be a higher priority than whatever cool new thing they want to sell.
It would take ripping apart and rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of source code, if not millions. Not just bloat from one off bright ideas, that led to the next bright ideas, but the deliberate obsfucation to protect proprietary code, in more instances than I can imagine. I’m not a programmer, so I could be wrong, obviously, but from my admittedly limited perspective, they’d be better off writing a whole new OS without all the built-in garbage nobody wants.
I think Windows 11 was supposed to be that clean break. They’ve reimplemented a lot of core functionality compared to XP & 7. If they’re still getting breached then they obviously aren’t serious about security.
The issues are primarily with Azure, I believe.
That’s … TFW words aren’t enough and too much, at once.