This is just a quick morale booster to show just how capable, no matter what is said on cable news, this country and its people really is. I get tired of hearing garbage about how we are past our prime, or somehow ceding the world stage. We are being smart and shrewd. We are being thoughtful and deliberative.
We are being Americans.
And, Microsoft is stepping up. After discovering a cyber-security threat to Ukraine, just before the invasion, it caught then shredded it. Then, in this most fraught of times, shared info with Ukraine’s top cyberdefense officials, and then the White House, working in partnership to protect American and Ukranian interests.
Within three hours, Microsoft threw itself into the middle of a ground war in Europe — from 5,500 miles away. The threat center, north of Seattle, had been on high alert, and it quickly picked apart the malware, named it “FoxBlade” and notified Ukraine’s top cyberdefense authority. Within three hours, Microsoft’s virus detection systems had been updated to block the code, which erases — “wipes” — data on computers in a network.
Then Tom Burt, the senior Microsoft executive who oversees the company’s effort to counter major cyberattacks, contacted Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for cyber- and emerging technologies. Neuberger asked if Microsoft would consider sharing details of the code with the Baltics, Poland and other European nations, out of fear that the malware would spread beyond Ukraine’s borders, crippling the military alliance or hitting West European banks.
Now being compared to Ford Motor Company’s role in World War II, without hopefully, the World War part, Microsoft is speeding up the process of patches and intelligence gathering.
“We are a company and not a government or a country,’’ Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, noted in a blog post issued by the company Monday, describing the threats it was seeing. But the role it is playing, he made clear, is not a neutral one. He wrote about “constant and close coordination” with the Ukrainian government, as well as federal officials, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. “I’ve never seen it work quite this way, or nearly this fast,’’ Burt said. “We are doing in hours now what, even a few years ago, would have taken weeks or months.”
The threat, as is said in the article, is never actually zero. Even in the best of times, Russian cybercriminals, some of the world’s most talented, are constantly on the lookout for weak browsers, opportunities for exploits, and are proficient in distributing what is called ransomware.
Ransomware is among the most dangerous, because entire facilties, ranging from utility to medical, could be shut down. But with one of the sharpest tools in the globa shed now at the President’s disposal, I for one, feel much safer going forward.
Not safe, just much safer.
-ROC