The White House has put Microsoft under the spotlight over software security issues.
Earlier this month, the software giant blamed the Chinese government for a cyber security incident that resulted in tens of thousands of compromised e-mail servers round the world.
This, after a sophisticated attack discovered on Microsoft’s e-mail system, Microsoft Exchange, was reportedly escalating into a global cyber security disaster, as hackers raced to infect as many users as possible.
Following the incident, yesterday White House press secretary Jen Psaki said a task force looking into the recent hack of the software company’s Exchange platform met this week with representatives of the private sector.
Last week, the National Security Council (NSC) established a Unified Coordination Group (UCG), to drive a whole-of-government response to the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities.
Psaki says on Monday, the NSC convened a UCG leadership meeting, which included private sector members for the first time, coordinating respective response efforts.
“We invited the private sector partners based on their specific insights to this incident, an approach the NSC will take going forward as appropriate,” she says.
“The UCG discussed the remaining number of unpatched systems, malicious exploitation, and ways to partner together on incident response, including the methodology partners could use for tracking the incident, going forward.”
According to Psaki, the cost of cyber incident responses weighs particularly heavily on small businesses.
“Hence, we requested that Microsoft help small businesses with a simple solution to this incident.”
In response, she says, Microsoft has released a one-click mitigation tool. “We encourage every business or organisation that has not yet fully patched and scanned their Exchange Server to download and run this free tool.”
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