Microsoft President Wants Industry Action on Cyber ‘Rules of the Road’

The Russian government-sponsored hack of SolarWinds Orion software used for network management systems (see 2012170050) prompted Microsoft President Brad Smith to use his prerecorded CES 2021 keynote Wednesday to urge tech industry action to write new cybersecurity “rules of the road.” World governments “have spied on each other for centuries,” said Smith. “But we’ve long lived in a world where there were norms and rules that created expectations about what was appropriate and what was not, and what happened with SolarWinds was not.” The breach amounted to a “mass, indiscriminate global assault on the technology supply chain that all of us are responsible for protecting,” said Smith. The attack distributed 18,000 “packages” of malware on network infrastructures globally, he said. “It is a danger that the world cannot afford.” The tech industry needs to use “our collective voice to say to every government around the world that this kind of supply chain disruption is not something that any government or any company should be allowed to pursue,” he said. “I hope we’ll come out of this CES and move forward with this as one of our clarion calls for the future.”