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.
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.
Thats what I did when win 7 support was ending, been very happy and there’s no way I’m going back to Windows.
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.
And this is exactly the problem. You STILL cannot trust them, fool me once, fool me twice?
This entire “weeewweeee sowwwyyy” bullshit excuse completely ignored the fact that they purposefully allowed the US government to be attacked because money is their bottom line. If it were a person (and aren’t companies persons now in the US?) they would have been jailed for treason. Jail these assholes already and switch ALL your computers to Linux
fucking seriously! Reading this absolutely disgusted me.
There needs to be a fine far larger than the contract to have any hope of curtailing this behavior.
The people making the decisions should be in jail. I don’t know if this is fraud in the legal sense but this is literally fraudulent behavior.
Ms has always been a shitty company, from the time it was formed
It wasn’t even Bill’s software iirc.
Again, just install Linux.
Dump your windows, install Linux, be done with this nonsense.
You switching is like turning around a rowboat.
Them switching is like turning around a cruise ship.
Sadly, I cannot do this for my work computer.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, “has taken on the responsibility personally to serve as the senior executive with overall accountability for Microsoft’s security,”
Err. Wasn’t that already true? He’s chief executive officer, not chief some shit that doesn’t include security officer.
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.
So we start…click on the paint brush icon…that tiny colourful thing right under the big ass “W” Icon. Now hit agree on the window asking if you’re secure. Wait a few moments and agree you your 2FA app on your phone. You might have to ask your wife to agree if you are married and bought the license for your spouse only. Cheapskate! Now stay here for a few minutes, we’ve called the 🚓🚨 police.
Oh no. How will I know where I’m going without copilot?!
the funniest part of the fall of MS for me has been the cunts getting so excited about fucking off the home users they forgot one vital thing: C-suite and beancounters run at a home user level. And most infrastructure techs will happily flick to a linux distro come server build time.
Their current direction has also pretty much killed their use in anything related to media distribution, it’s virtually a detailed list of TPN violations
Their current direction has also pretty much killed their use in anything related to media distribution, it’s virtually a detailed list of TPN violations
Eh, that’s actually kind of a selling point.
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.
ai ethics teams are a joke. They deserve to get fired.
Definitely wasn’t aware of that…
literally fired their entire AI Ethics team
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638823/microsoft-ethics-society-team-responsible-ai-layoffs
It’s always one of the first things to get cut when companies try to save money.
They legally can’t prioritize shit but shareholder profits. We are all about to watch a US based company, purposefully fuck over the US government and possibly us by extension, and nothing will happen. Fuck this oligarchy.
They legally can’t prioritize shit but shareholder profits.
This is a lie… Stop spreading it as it helps corporations hide behind it to do evil shit
I just jumped down a rabbit hole, thank you. Where the fuck did that statement come from? I didn’t find the source of it. Only that its not true.
There was some case where shareholders sued the board or the CEO because they were borderline embezzling.
In the judgement there was some language that these thieves were not prioritizing the shareholders and from that, the whole lie evolved that USA corporations have to kill their grandma’s if that’s the only way to profit
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.
That’s … TFW words aren’t enough and too much, at once.
The issues are primarily with Azure, I believe.
I remember them saying all the same exact things in the early 2000s after a slew of widespread disasters. Security will never be a higher priority than whatever cool new thing they want to sell.
So they lied und tried to cover it up, which led to the largest cyber attack ever. There’s going to be serious punishment, right? Right?
(⁀ᗢ⁀) hahahaha
Oh, shit haha! I thought you were serious for a second. Can you imagine if we ever held a corporation accountable for the damage they’ve caused? I mean it obviously can’t happen, but wow! You had me for a second!
Lol, Microsoft will focus on profits and shareholders, and shareholders want AI cramed into everything.
You mean they have been letting it slip?
