- Microsoft’s president hopes that Donald Trump will “push harder” against state-sponsored cyber threats.
- Hacking and ransomware attacks, often connected to Russia and China, have increased in recent years.
- Cybersecurity “deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations,” Smith said.
Microsoft President Brad Smith has urged Donald Trump to protect the US from Russian, Chinese, and Iranian cyber attacks.
In an interview with The Financial Times, Smith, who is also the vice chair and top legal officer at Microsoft, said that cyber security “deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations.”
“I hope that the Trump administration will push harder against nation-state cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China and Iran,” Smith told The FT. “We should not tolerate the level of attacks that we are seeing today.”
He said that Joe Biden’s administration had made “tremendous progress” on the issue, but added that more steps were needed to dissuade and deter countries from “unleashing these cyber attacks.”
Smith’s appeals come as the US faces an ongoing wave of cyber attacks that have targeted government agencies, election campaigns, and businesses.
Ransomware attacks are often carried out by criminal gangs who hold or limit access to data as ransom, but the Russian government often “tolerated . . . and in some cases even facilitated” such attacks, Smith told the FT.
In October, a top Microsoft security executive said that a group of hackers previously linked to Russia’s intelligence services had been involved in some 23,000 attacks on more than 600 organizations.
In February, FBI director Christopher Wray warned that cyberattacks carried out against the US by Chinese hackers were reaching a “fever pitch” and were enabling the theft of AI tech and data.
Microsoft has come under scrutiny this year for its own security practices after a government Cyber Safety watchdog group found that its security culture was “inadequate” and needed an “overhaul.”
The review found that a Microsoft security breach by a Chinese-affiliated hacking group in 2023 was “preventable and should never have occurred.”
CEO Satya Nadella asked the board to reduce his pay by $5 million to reflect his accountability in Microsoft’s need to meet the challenges of the cybersecurity landscape. The company has said it is making security its number one priority.
