Russia, Ukraine, and Microsoft

Microsoft, Doing the Right Thing

So if your country’s being attacked, invaded, and essentially just under siege, who are you going to call, Microsoft?

I want to call your attention to something that’s going on in terms of the current Russian invasion and attacks on Ukraine that really brought Microsoft front and center.

And this information is taken from primarily a post from Brad Smith, President and Vice-chair of Microsoft who talks about the roles that Microsoft played and it’s a pretty cool story actually.

Microsoft, the good guys in this one.

Essentially what happened was on February 24th there was a significant increase on the cyber attacks that were directed against Ukraine’s infrastructure. Microsoft in Seattle essentially, discovered this and immediately not only advised the Ukrainian government about the situation but also over about a 3-hour period of time created the appropriate defenses against this new malware package which Microsoft called Foxblade.

Within 3 hours, Microsoft added to their defender product, the defense against the threat, and provided a threat intelligence and defensive solution or suggestions to the Ukrainian officials and then ultimately other countries who asked for that type of help proactively.

So when you think about it, Microsoft actually was that first line of defense and aggressively took steps to improve and increase that line of defense against Russia.

Kudos to Microsoft.

Now the blog post that Brad did offers additional information regarding protection against state sponsored disinformation, support for humanitarian aid, all that good fun stuff. But to a certain degree there’s a lot of words there and a lot of, here’s what we want, here’s what we like, but this really shows a great example of what Microsoft did and did immediately without request and with great immediate effect.

So did Microsoft do the right thing?

I think so.