this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago (4 children)

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!

[–] MojoMcJojo 9 points 6 months ago

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

  1. Retrain an aging workforce to use a new OS.
  2. Retrain to use new software suite for email, docs, etc.
  3. Or rebuild existing software to run on Linux
  4. ...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.

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