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.
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.
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.
id argue arguing the unknown can’t be used to say if its technically secure, nor insecure. If that kind of coding is brought into place, then say any OS using non open source hardware is insecure because the VHDL/Verilog code is not verifiable.
Unless everyone running an open source version of RISC-V code or a FPGA for their hardware, its a game of goalposts on where someone puts said flag.
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
