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.

  • Taleya
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    6 months ago

    the funniest part of the fall of MS for me has been the cunts getting so excited about fucking off the home users they forgot one vital thing: C-suite and beancounters run at a home user level. And most infrastructure techs will happily flick to a linux distro come server build time.

    Their current direction has also pretty much killed their use in anything related to media distribution, it’s virtually a detailed list of TPN violations

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      a detailed list of TPN violations

      Eh, that’s actually kind of a selling point. I’ve got no interest in an OS on my personal PC that focuses on being made more friendly to the MPA.