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I like this bit ... a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cyber
by shultays 3y ago
I like this bit
... a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents.
Yeah, at least they make a very small percentage of all Microsoft employees I guess
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoAlso this: "To date, there is no evidence that the threat actor had any access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems." So email accounts of senior leadership and employees in cybersecurity are apparently not production systems.
- fremenite 3y agoThey mean root access on the production email servers, not access to individual email accounts.
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago"any access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems" does not mean root access. It can also mean access to data.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoNo, they are not. Production systems are the systems that are producing money. If they stop running for an hour, it directly costs the company money through SLA penalties, etc. If the internal email server goes down for an hour, it might cause some employee productivity loss, depending on the timing.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoThat may be how Microsoft would like to portray it but I disagree. A production system is a system that is operated to serve its actual purpose rather than being used as a development or testing environment. From the point of view of in-house IT, the company's email server is a production system. It is what they produce for their in-house customers.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoThat is how it has been defined at every SAAS company I have worked for. When someone says there is an outage in production, it means your product.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoIn the context of an outage at a service provider this slightly sloppy language is sufficient to convey all relevant meaning. In the current context, this language is part of a pattern to carefully choose words in such a way as to downplay what has happened. As I said, the work of the CEO, the cybersecurity team and the legal team is part of the overall production process at a software company.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoOkay, but then why also not consider chairs breaking in the office to mean part of the production is down? Or a coffee machine?
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoIf my coffee machine suddenly stopped working it would definitely have a detrimental effect on production. I can guarantee you that :) But in general I would say routine janitorial maintenance issues don't have quite the same potential to affect production as Russian criminals reading the email of Microsoft's cybersecurity team.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoIf the blog post was written by their internal IT team, you’d be totally justified in reading “production” to include their internal systems.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoNo. Whether or not a system runs in production as opposed to a testing/development environment is not a question of who is writing a blog post. Microsoft produces software and services. The communications of their CEO as well as their cybersecurity and legal teams is part of that overall production process.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoWhen having an incident like that, always figure out what is the largest denominator you could compare the exposure against.