738

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] demizerone@lemmy.world 25 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Well recall is why they're so focused on security now. They want to host every detail of your life. They can't do that now because their platform is a tire fire.

[-] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 19 points 3 weeks ago

their platform is a tire fire.

Always has been

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

Eh.....Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

They HAVE released some hot trash. I don't even remember Vista. I just remember it's trash.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 16 points 3 weeks ago

Eh.....Windows 3.1, 95, 98SE, XP, and 7 were all pretty great.

From a user interface perspective, they were okay, perhaps because by the time people got to XP they'd had a decade of a consistent interface and were just used to its quirks.

From a security context they were not ok. Not ok at all.

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

I genuinely don't know if I left my firewall on or off the last time I fiddled with it, on my Windows 7 machine.

That was like 10 years ago. It's still my daily use pc. Zero antivirus. Just firefox which was installed 10 years ago. And ad block orgin which was also installed 10 years ago but updated over the years.

Oddly enough, the only website I have issue with is lemmy.

[-] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

There's security people retching around the world and they're not sure why.

[-] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

Was it 95 that you could hit cancel at the log in screen and it would let you skip putting in a password?

Sure it looked pretty, but security was a disaster.

[-] joe_cool@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

Oh, lemmy has cakes. Happy cake day.

That password was only for network shares/NT domains. 95 didn't have any concept of users, like DOS.

[-] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago

In 98 you could use the accessibility settings in the login page to bypass account password too!

[-] joe_cool@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago

I just pressed cancel. Who needs network shares.
On XP you could start the On Screen Keyboard, open the help for that and then open the explorer by browsing for a different help file.

MS has a history of security first.

[-] trolololol@lemmy.world 0 points 3 weeks ago

Nope, always garbage. It did get worse with vista and 11 though

[-] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 weeks ago

Happy cake day!

this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
738 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

55692 readers
2548 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS