Microsoft urges Donald Trump to ‘push harder’ against Russia and China hacks

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Microsoft’s president has called on Donald Trump to “push harder” against cyber attacks from Russia, China and Iran amid a wave of state-sponsored hacks targeting US government officials and election campaigns.

Brad Smith, who is also the Big Tech company’s vice chair and top legal officer, told the Financial Times that cyber security “deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations” and appealed to the US president-elect to send a “strong message”.

“I hope that the Trump administration will push harder against nation-state cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China and Iran,” Smith said. “We should not tolerate the level of attacks that we are seeing today.”

Ransomware attacks against US businesses have surged in recent years, often perpetrated by criminal gangs that Smith said were “tolerated . . . and in some cases even facilitated” by the Russian government.

Last week, US law enforcement agencies accused China of mounting a widespread cyber espionage campaign, by breaking into several American telecoms networks in the run-up to this month’s election.

Smith said Joe Biden’s administration had made “tremendous progress in strengthening cyber security protections” but added: “There’s more steps that are needed, especially in dissuading and deterring these other countries from unleashing these cyber attacks.”

A recent Microsoft study found that its customers face more than 600mn cyber attacks every day, with criminal gangs and “nation-state groups” increasingly teaming up to share tools and even conducting joint operations.

Smith testified before the US Senate in September that Russia, China and Iran had stepped up their digital efforts to interfere in global elections this year, including in the US.

However, Microsoft’s own security standards have come under fire in recent months. A damning report by the US Cyber Safety Review Board in March said its security culture was “inadequate”, pointing to a “cascade . . . of avoidable errors” that last year allowed Chinese hackers to access hundreds of email accounts, including those belonging to senior US government security officials, that were hosted on Microsoft’s cloud systems.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said in response that the company would prioritise security “above all else”, including by tying staff remuneration to security.

The company is also making changes to its Windows operating system to help its customers recover more quickly from incidents such as July’s global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike’s botched security update.

Beyond cyber security, Smith said it was “a little early” to determine the precise impact of a second Trump administration on the technology industry. Any anticipated liberalisation of M&A regulation in the US would have to be weighed up against continued scrutiny of dealmaking in other parts of the world, he said.

Smith also reiterated his plea for the US government to “help accelerate exports of key American digital technologies”, especially to the Middle East and Africa, after the Biden administration imposed export controls on AI chips, fearing the technology could leak to China.

“We really need now to standardise processes so that American technology can reach these other parts of the world as fast as Chinese technology,” he said.