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.
To reinforce the shift in company culture toward “empowering and rewarding every employee to find security issues, report them,” and “help fix them,” Smith said that Nadella sent an email out to all staff urging that security should always remain top of mind.
Yeah that ought to do it.
Lol. Considering it was senior management that ignored staff, this statement is even fucking dumber than it sounds.
That’s just barely thoughts-and-prayers level. They could at least schedule a mandatory meeting that interrupts everyone’s day for half an hour.
Usually they set up a hotline which may or may not get you fired.
Using the hotline won’t get you fired, but somehow - for totally unrelated reasons - after using it you’ll end up on a PIP with untenable goals, and that will get you fired.
This statement, from the company that looked at Recall and collectively said “yeah, this is a good idea”.
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.
their platform is a tire fire.
Always has been
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.
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.
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.
There’s security people retching around the world and they’re not sure why.
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.
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.
That’s … TFW words aren’t enough and too much, at once.
Pick one:
- security
- proprietary OS
you can have a propietary os thats secure, but the problem is once you get to the point where youre selling data and allow anything to be installed of course, its no longer secure.
Sure its secure, but is it verifiably secure?
I mean you can provide audit findings and results and it’s a pretty big part of vendor management and due diligence but at some point you have to accept risk in using open source software that can be susceptible to supply chain hacks, might be poorly maintained, etc or accept the risk of taking the closed source company’s documentation at face value (and that can also be poorly maintained and susceptible to supply chain attacks)
There’s got to be some level of risk tolerance to do business and open source doesn’t actually reduce risk. But it can at least reduce enshittification
It’s pretty hilarious when people act like being open source means it’s “more secure”. It can be, but it’s absolutely not guaranteed. The xz debacle comes to mind.
There are tons of bugs in open source software. Linux has had its fair share.
Proprietary software has to be caught being insecure to be “guilty of” being insecure. Free software can be publically verified, effectively “proven innocent” - a much higher standard.
You can’t verify it’s secure if it’s proprietary, so it’s never secure? Having control over other people’s computing creates bad incentives to gain at your user’s expense, so it’s day 1 you should lose trust.
You can have audits done on proprietary software. Just because the public can’t see it doesn’t mean nobody else can.
That just moves requiring trust from the 1st party to 2nd or 3rd party. Unreasonable trust.
Do you yourself actually audit the software you use, or do you just trust what others say?
This is like asking if you do scientific experiments yourself or do you trust others’ results. I distrust private prejudice and trust public, verifiable evidence that’s survived peer review.
Scientists in the room who have to base their experiments off other peoples data and results:
Tongue in cheek but this is actually giving me particular headache because of some results (not mine) that should have never been published.
I hope MS can fulfill its promise and not abandon it like they did with Surface RT, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Lumia, Kinect, Xbox, MSN Messenger, Cortana, Tango Studio, “Windows 10 is MS’s last OS”, etc.
Seriously, why are governments using Microsoft software?
Don’t give me the nonsense line of “they need support”. There is support for Linux too, and Linux, sorry, works, is reliable and most importantly: a hell of a lot safer than windows. This is example #346269 where Microsoft not only fails to keep windows even remotely safe, but actively sabotaged their customers (in this case the US government) for their own profit.
And again, “wwheeeyyyrreee sooowwyyyy, pleeeaaasseeee forgif us?” Look! Look! Even our CEO will now be interested in secuwity!
Seriously I’m so tired of having to read this over and over and he government will just contoi to pump millions over millions into that piece of crap company.
Switch to Linux already and have computers that you can trust have no known issues that are not being resolved to cover for a few rich assholes!
Political leadership isn’t technically knowledgeable. It is focused on building large social networks of agreeable people. And Linux is an application by and for techies, not CEOs or social clubs. Consequently, when you’ve got six old white Harvard Alums in a room discussing how to run the country, one of them is going to be a Microsoft C-level and none of them are going to mention an alternative OS (except maybe Apple, in so far as they want their phone to magically integrate with a hostile OS rival).
Switch to Linux already and have computers that you can trust
A lot of these Microsoft features are about internal surveillance of staff and accumulating behavior patterns for future automation of service. This is not intended to be about building trust in the OS from the perspective of system security. Its more about finding patterns in human behavior that can be leveraged to reduce the size and pay-scale of your work force.
To that end, Microsoft is a highly valued partner while the Linux developers are an outright threat.
If Microsoft cares so much about security, then WTF are they doing greenlighting a project like CoPilot / Recall?
Its part of their large scale automation strategy, wherein they gobble up as much of the business practices of an organization’s staff as possible and then offer to provide “AI Employees” who replicate the logic of human staffers at a discounted price.
Again, just install Linux.
Dump your windows, install Linux, be done with this nonsense.
Sadly, I cannot do this for my work computer.
Ms has always been a shitty company, from the time it was formed
It wasn’t even Bill’s software iirc.
Look at this smug assholes face. He knows damn well they won’t be doing anything of the sort unless it increases their profit margins. And he also knows damn well the government won’t do anything to seriously hinder their margins.
Bread and circuses. This is just another show. You want change? Stop using Microsoft. Period.
That’s all week and good for the minority of jobs that didn’t cling to it like a codependent partner.
