Ex-White House Cyber Policy Director: Microsoft is a National Security Risk

This week the Register spoke to former senior White House cyber policy director A.J. Grotto - who complained it was hard to get even slight concessions from Microsoft:"If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago ... [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies" instead of making it the default, Grotto said. "As a result, it was really hard for agencies to identify their exposure to the SolarWinds breach." Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default. [In the interview he calls it "an epic fight" which lasted 18 months."] [G]iven the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best. That illustrates, Grotto said, that "they [Microsoft] just have a ton of leverage, and they're not afraid to use it." Add to that concerns over an Exchange Online intrusion by Chinese snoops, and another Microsoft security breach by Russian cyber operatives, both of which allowed spies to gain access to US government emails, and Grotto says it's fair to classify Microsoft and its products as a national security concern. He estimates that Microsoft makes 85% of U.S. government productivity software - and has an even greater share of their operating systems. "Microsoft in many ways has the government locked in, he says in the interview, "and so it's able to transfer a lot of these costs associated with the security breaches over to the federal government." And about five minutes in, he says, point-blank, that "It's perfectly fair" to consider Microsoft a national security threat, given its dominance "not just within the federal government, but really in sort of the boarder IT marketplace. I think it's fair to say, yeah, that a systemic compromise that affects Microsoft and its products do rise to the level of a national security risk." He'd like to see the government encourage more competition - to the point where public scrutiny prompts software customers to change their behavior, and creates a true market incentive for better performance...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.