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Microsoft Chose Profit over Security, Whistleblower Says


Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others.

The product, which was used by millions of people to log on to their work computers, contained a flaw that could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through victims’ “crown jewels” — national security secrets, corporate intellectual property, embarrassing personal emails — all without tripping alarms. Harris’ high school yearbookCredit: Classmates.com As a sophomore at Pace University in New York, he wrote a white paper titled “How to Hack the Wired Equivalent Protocol,” a network security standard, and was awarded a prestigious Defense Department scholarship, which the government uses to recruit cybersecurity specialists. Soon after, the Massachusetts- and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm CyberArk published a blog post describing the flaw, which it dubbed “Golden SAML,” along with a proof of concept, essentially a road map that showed how hackers could exploit the weakness.

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