Microsoft President Brad Smith faces the The House Homeland Security committee amid sharp criticism the company’s security practices put government clients at risk.
The House Homeland Security committee is grilling Microsoft President Brad Smith Thursday about the software giant’s plans to improve its security after a series of devastating hacks reached into federal officials’ email accounts, challenging the company’s fitness as a dominant government contractor.on one of those breaches, where the federal Cyber Safety Review Board found the event was made possible by a “cascade of avoidable errors” and a security culture “that requires an overhaul.
“Cybersecurity should be a core attribute of software, not a premium feature that companies upsell to deep-pocketed government and corporate customers,” Sens. Eric Schmitt and Ron Wyden wrote. “Through its buying power, DOD’s strategies and standards have the power to shape corporate strategies that result in more resilient cybersecurity services.”Summary is AI-generated, newsroom-reviewed.
Smith said the company had made security its top priority throughout the company and would fulfill the Review Board’s recommendations for both the company and the industry as a whole.The testimony raised eyebrows among some security professionals who pointed to Microsoft’s rollout this month of a Windows feature called Recall, which takes screenshots of most activity on a personal computer every few seconds and stores them in order to make searching for past actions easier.
Though Microsoft said that users would only be able to see their own histories and that they would otherwise remain encrypted and stored locally, experts called it a treasure trove for electronic intruders. Theyanyone with administrative rights to a machine could spy on other users, and that a hacker could export and read files, including records of financial passwords and encrypted messages, if they broke in.
After declining to comment on those reports for more than a week, Microsoft said it would not ship Recall as on by default, as planned, and that it would require more authentication by a user to turn on.
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