- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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.
The issues are primarily with Azure, I believe.
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.
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.
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.