Written by by Julio Rivera at californiaglobe.com
In America, the Washington D.C. uniparty types like to make you think that they are all for reining in big corporations in favor of the “little guy.” But in practice, it seems that across many industries, the practice of squeezing out competition via government subsidy or legislative or bureaucratic intervention is often carried out by legislators with a vested interest in the long-term success of their “donating constituency.”
In one of the more potentially damaging examples of this type of monopolistic cronyism, during the 2023 Fiscal Year, the U.S. government gifted Microsoft nearly $500 million dollars, despite the fact that more than 50% of government workers believe that the reliance on Microsoft’s productivity technology makes them more vulnerable to ransomware, trojans, and other cyber intrusions.
The whopping 50% figure shouldn’t really come to as a surprise to anyone paying attention. As hackers have exploited more than 280 Microsoft software vulnerabilities over a little more than 2 decades.
After one of the more recent major examples of this pattern of consistent futility, the massive Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange Online intrusion, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was compelled to finally conduct a full investigation. The official reporting on the hack, found that Microsoft’s negligence was directly responsible for the Chinese government-affiliated breach last summer, which, according to the DHS Cyber Safety Review Board, “never should have happened.”
Flaws in Microsoft’s authentication system allowed these Chinese hackers to sign into “essentially any Exchange Online account anywhere in the world.” This unfettered access to nearly every Microsoft account in the world allowed them to breach the e-mails of multiple U.S. and Canadian agencies and individuals.
This Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack wasn’t the first significant hacking of Microsoft by an adversarial nation, as recent news has demonstrated with a March 2024 report noting that Russia’s SCR foreign intelligence service used data from hacking core Microsoft software to penetrate several of the company’s internal systems in January.