Microsoft has just published a pretty good update on the cyber-threat landscape, Digital Defense Report 2024.
The report comprehensively describes the recent prolific activity of state-affiliated hackers all over the world, primarily those affiliated with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
In the case of China, we have a series of “Typhoon”-named cyberattacks: Raspberry Typhoon, Flax Typhoon, and Granite Typhoon, to name a few, that “have intensively targeted entities associated with IT, military, and government interests around the South China Sea.”
The toll of cyberattacks in the U.S. — all kinds from all sources — has been extensive. In the recent year, “389 healthcare institutions were successfully hit by ransomware,” resulting in closures and medical delays.
The report is also about what we’ve been doing to defend ourselves: not enough. The authors say that although better cybersecurity is important, we also need “government action” that makes it costlier for states to launch these attacks.
We need something else, too. We need companies like Microsoft to abstain from helping adversary states to cyberattack us.
At Breitbart, Lucas Nolan reports that Microsoft has been maintaining close ties with the Chinese Academy of Sciences for over a decade. Among the details of a lengthy indictment, Nolan offers a list of publications coauthored by Microsoft and CAS researchers “in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, computer vision, and even cybersecurity.”
Why help China gain knowledge that can be used to hurt us?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “The Beam in Microsoft’s Eye”
“Adversary states”
Redundant. There is no other kind of state.
If the United States and the PRC indeed move into outright warfare, differentiating between these states and the respective nations that they govern will be especially desirable. We don’t want Americans to imagine that they have been attacked by China, and thence to mistake doing terrible things to the Chinese for justice.
I realize, of course, that one cannot do business in China without involving the Chinese state, so that good reason exists not to do such business. But helping China in-and-of-itself would be a good thing.
The enemy is the CCP. Not the Chinese people.