Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith took to the company’s website to give a post mortem on the lessons that need to be learned from the..
Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith took to the company’s website to give a post mortem on the lessons that need to be learned from the global hack that crippled businesses and government services around the world.
After walking through the ways that the “WannaCrypt” (or WannaCry) virus spread from the United Kingdom and Spain to websites around the world using exploits that were stolen from the National Security Agency in the United States.
While Smith said that Microsoft (and its customers) need to take more responsibility for their role, the executive laid the bulk of the responsibility for the massive cyberhack at the feet of government agencies.
Smith wrote:
Put simply, cyberweapons are just that — weapons. It’s the digital equivalent of stockpiling a nuclear arsenal and keeping them in a standard safe (or keeping a deadly virus in the office fridge) .
The NSA shouldn’ t think that it can amass powerful hacks and be able to keep them secure, because we’ ve seen just how porous the U. S. cybersecurity apparatus is .
If these were conventional weapons, the world would be up in arms. And indeed, the world should be.
