this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Lol. Considering it was senior management that ignored staff, this statement is even fucking dumber than it sounds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

This statement, from the company that looked at Recall and collectively said "yeah, this is a good idea".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Pick one:

  • security
  • proprietary OS
[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sure its secure, but is it verifiably secure?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Again, just install Linux.

Dump your windows, install Linux, be done with this nonsense.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Sadly, I cannot do this for my work computer.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If Microsoft cares so much about security, then WTF are they doing greenlighting a project like CoPilot / Recall?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

That's ... TFW words aren't enough and too much, at once.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

That's all week and good for the minority of jobs that didn't cling to it like a codependent partner.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ms has always been a shitty company, from the time it was formed

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

It wasn't even Bill's software iirc.