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.
Same energy as “You have unlimited PTO here, but we also have this nifty little thing called performance metrics”
“Next week to improve employee morale we will have a pizza party” - Nadella, probably
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
Happy cake day!
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.
Nope, always garbage. It did get worse with vista and 11 though
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.
In 98 you could use the accessibility settings in the login page to bypass account password too!
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.
I doubt MS even knows what security means
Oh they know, Azure is running on Linux
My suggestion, based on more than three decades of observing and interacting with this company: don’t believe a fucking thing they say, ever.
no they won’t. these pricks literally fired their entire AI Ethics team… that tells you everything you need to know about where their priorities are.
the only thing they are gonna do about this is figure out a way to make people not angry, but continue to fo as much shady shit as they can.
Definitely wasn’t aware of that…
literally fired their entire AI Ethics team
ai ethics teams are a joke. They deserve to get fired.
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 users 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?
Wait…you don’t audit every package and dependency before you compile and install?
That’s crazy risky my man.
Me? I know security and take it seriously, unlike some people here. I’m actually almost done with my audit and should be ready to finally boot Fedora 8 within the next 6-8 months.
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.
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.
Consider people counting paper votes in an election. Multiple political parties are motivated by their own self interests to watch the counting to prevent each other faking votes. That is a security feature and without it then the validity of the election has a critical unknown making it very sussy.
An OS using proprietary software is like as an electronic voting machine, we pretend it’s secure to feel better about a failing we can’t change.
the problem is the bad actors have direct access to said voting machines. in the case of security, the people creating the OS is not the bad actor typically in question when you think of bad actors, which kind of goes back to the goalpost situation. Unless you knew how everything is designed from the ground up (including the hardware code in whatever language it is) then thats just setting an arbitrary goalpost. basically typical NSA backdoor, or foreign backdoor via hardware situation, independent of the OS. To bluntly place it only at the OS stage is setting said goalpost there when you can really apply it to any part of the line (the chip design, the hardware assembler, the os designer, the software maker). Setting it at the OS level fundamentally means all OS’ are insecure by nature unless you’re actively running it on a FPGA thats constantly getting updates.
For instance, any CPU with speculative programming fundamentally is insecure and is virtually in all modern processors. never even mind the CPU when the door is already open regardless of the OS.
When I think of bad actors and software I think of security from 3rd parties after the intentions of the authors. Not just security but also privacy and any other anti-features users wouldn’t want. That applies to the OS, apps or drivers. Hardware indeed has concerns like software, which is just a wider conversation about security, which is just part of user/consumer rights.
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.
The XZ thing is actually a great point to open source’s favor. All it took was some dude to figure it out.
If you try to inject maligned code, you will be found out. That can’t happen with proprietary software.
I’ve spent the better part of my life watching microsoft fuck people over and then when they finally - finally get called out on it they do a bunch of bashful aw-shucksing before doing it again and again and again.
No.
Microsoft is dead. Kill it with fire. The US government should have known better, but they didn’t because like every other organization they have a boatload of clueless mid-level managers who only every learned Windows and fall for microsoft’s garbage every time, despite the eye-popping price.
NO MICROSOFT. EVER. They’re a criminal organizaiton, the amount of destruction they’ve created will never be known.
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!
When I worked with defense contractors in Canada, Microsoft would sue the government whenever it didn’t get awarded a contract it applied for.
A lot of the ‘big establishment’ companies will imediately sue when they lose a contract.
A few years back, the JEDI acquisition triggered Oracle and IBM: https://fedscoop.com/oracle-petitions-supreme-court-over-10b-jedi-protest/ https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/11/26/ibm-adds-to-its-jedi-cloud-contract-protest/
I imagine it must suck to be involved in a big government procurement, because you are pretty much guaranteed to have to get pulled into legal proceedings by one or more of the losers.
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.
A much much larger proportion of users are computer illiterate, especially federal employees. On top of that, the vast majority of basic software applications used are the Microsoft suite of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. How do you
- Retrain an aging workforce to use a new OS.
- Retrain to use new software suite for email, docs, etc.
- Or rebuild existing software to run on Linux
- …there’s more but I’m short on time…
The ENTIRE US govt runs on Microsoft. That’s a very big pie to rebake. Where do you even begin. I do agree with you, it just feels unsurmountable.
Why in the absolute fuuuuuck would a “secure” computer with sensitive data be running motherfucking Windows?! Linux is easy enough for pretty much any Windows user in an office environment to handle these days. There’s just no excuse for sensitive business to ever be done on Windows at this point.
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
This says everything about this shitty company. Worst of the worst. Because that’s how they make 90% of their cash. By exploiting licensing deals and siphoning data to sell to whomever because they do not care who it is so long as they bid the highest.
It’s amazing no one has tried to break up their control over PCs. Make this world make sense.
Too late. Linux is going from my hobby project to my primary OS by the time they stop providing Windows 10 updates, if not sooner.
Rather than driving the industry forward with leadership and vision Microsoft is being driven by AI and Advertising fads that are self destructing facebook and google.
Its clear its too late for Microsoft to do anything but lose trust at this point. If the outlook hacks and US government didnt cause them to rethink these terrible anti-privacy ideas then a bit of AI backlash won’t either. As soon as people look away they’ll start stuffing the OS with snoopware again.
That is basically the biggest fuck up you could make as a government contracted technology provider.
“Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority…”
The fact that this had to be stated is a testament to garbage leadership. Notice it’s not even the top priority, just a top priority. These guys will still get bonuses of course.
The security will definitely also take a very profitable shape. I.e. further locking the OS away from the user, more black box software, etc.
Linux is great. It was initially concerning to migrate but overall I’m happy I did. I assume Microsoft will attempt to make things more incompatible and proprietary as a last chance attempt to hold onto users. Ultimate this will just lead to more people switching to Linux faster over time.
There is no way a regular user will switch to Linux. And that is comming from me, who is an advocate for Linux desktop daily driver.
Some distros are really beginner friendly
I’d say the problem with Linux is not so much with beginner users, it’s easy enough to setup a basic desktop with a web browser and some tools, but with intermediate users who know enough to be dangerous on Windows and think that makes them “advanced”, who then can’t apply their clickety clackety ways of figuring things out on Linux.
As beginner friendly as they are you still can’t play Sims 1 and 2 on them.
You can’t play Helldivers 2 because of the anti cheat it has. Also some what less importantly it can run any of my work software. Now, I could dual boot but this a pain to deal with because now I have to swap OS’s depending on what software I want to run.
Those anticheats are so annoying. You can play brawlhalla on linux but since they added EAC you often can’t play offline because of random updates
Helldivers works fine. Sometimes its anticheat complains but most of the time when that happens it launches and works anyway or you kill it and start again and it works.
I thought I would never switch to Linux, and here we are.