It’s no mystery that Microsoft has gone crazy over AI development. But that’s not the only thing that the company should be focusing on. Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world, and that makes it a big target for hackers. As such, Microsoft stated that security is its top priority.
Microsoft was called out recently over a series of pretty big hacks that it went through in recent history. Between May and June 2023, Microsoft was hacked by a Chinese hacking group named Storm-0558. This hack affected Microsoft Exchange online, with more than 500 people and 22 organizations being impacted worldwide.
The next high-profile hack happened in either the last months of 2023 or January 2024. The company was hacked by a bad actor named Nobelium. This was a Russian state-sponsored hacker who gained access to internal and executive email accounts.
Microsoft is making security its top priority
Because of these hacks, Microsoft and its CEO were called out by the CSRB (Cyber Security Review Board). The board said that the company’s oversight was inadequate, and it wants it to make security more of a priority. Over the past year, Microsoft has made AI one of its core focuses. It’s been aggressively pushing Copilot on Windows users.
However, when such a large company gets hacked, it definitely raises some eyebrows. So, the company CEO, Satya Nadella, announced that Microsoft is going to be focusing primarily on cybersecurity, and this will involve some pretty big changes to the company and its inner workings.
In a statement, Nadella said, “We are focused on making continuous progress across the six pillars of this initiative as we protect tenants and isolate production systems, protect identities and secrets, protect networks, protect engineering systems, monitor and detect threats, and accelerate response and remediation.”
He also mentioned the tool that was made available earlier this month which is called Copilot for Security. It should come as no surprise that Microsoft is using AI tools to help boost its cyber security. Copilot for Security “[brings] together LLMs with domain-specific skills informed by our threat intelligence and 78 trillion daily security signals, to provide security teams with actionable insights.”