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.

  • FergleFFergleson
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    5 months ago

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

    • demizerone@lemmy.world
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      5 months 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.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          5 months 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.

          • Dave.@aussie.zone
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            5 months 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
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              5 months 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.

          • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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            5 months 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
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              5 months 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
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              5 months ago

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

              • Joe Cool@lemmy.ml
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                5 months 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.