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.

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • 3volver@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You can’t play Helldivers 2 because of the anti cheat it has.

          Wrong, entirely. I have played Helldivers 2 on Linux Mint using Proton Experimental compatibility through steam.

        • pantherfarber@lemmings.world
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            5 months ago

            I could not get it to load up. The game would load but the anti cheat just refused to run, and then I couldn’t connect.

            • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I couldn’t get anything to work but steamdb seems to have plenty who do. I will try again.

              • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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                5 months ago

                This right here is my biggest complaint about Linux. Sometimes it just doesn’t work properly and the only person on the entire planet that has the issue is you, and therefore no one else believes or can help you.

                • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Looking at steamdb. I see a ton if Tumbleweed. That might be worth looking into but I also see nobody running my GPU. Its a 2080 TI that is basically my old faithful. I promise its that. If I had an AMD, or even an Intel, I bet my games would run fine. I dont think I saw 1 review using my GPU on steamdb.

        • sep@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Never been an issue for me debian+kde+steam it started right up the first time i tried. No tweaking needed.

        • QuantumSoul@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          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

    • TheMediocreOne@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Yes, they are. But there are still some issues and don’t get me started on MS Office which many people are used to. Belive me, that the true hill the Linux will die on. I tried to switch couple of people and they all refused because of the MS Office. And no, LibreOffice, nor OnlyOffice nor Google or MS online editors do not hit the mark sadly.