Microsoft asks President Trump for help against Russian and Chinese cyber attacks

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Brad Smith, the vice chair and top legal officer at Microsoft, said that he is hoping President Trump and his administration push back harder against foreign cyber attacks, particularly those that originate from Russia and China.

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Cyber attacks from Russia and China have become more and more frequent, with Microsoft only recently confirming that Russian state-backed hacking group Midnight Blizzard infiltrated its servers. Microsoft has since implemented security updates to mitigate the likelihood of breaches, but attacks are still increasing and only becoming more sophisticated. Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice chair and top legal officer, has called upon the Trump Administration to "push harder" against cyber attacks, saying the issue "deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations".

Smith has said he hopes Trump is prepared to send a "strong message" to Russia, Iran, and any other nation that is launching cyber attacks on the US. It was only earlier this month US authorities accused China of launching widespread cyber espionage campaigns against the US, with a recent Microsoft-led study finding that more than 600 million cyber attacks are launched at its customers every day. Moreover, Microsoft found that criminal gangs are now increasingly teaming up with "nation-state groups" to launch operations against targets and share hacking tools.

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"I hope that the Trump administration will push harder against nation-state cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China and Iran," Smith said. "We should not tolerate the level of attacks that we are seeing today."

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