Microsoft deemed a national security threat to the US government

The former White House cyber policy director has said Microsoft has a stunning amount of control over the US federal government and is not afraid to use it.

In a recent interview with The Register, ex-White House cyber policy director AJ Grotto explained that Microsoft has a surprising amount of control within the US federal government and that the company's recent security failings are an illustration of how Microsoft is a national security threat to the US.

Grotto explains that Microsoft accounts for 85% of the federal government productivity software services, and a result of that market dominance is Microsoft gaining an "awful lot" of leverage over the government, as it simply cannot walk away from such an engrained vendor. Microsoft's recent hacking by a Russian-linked group that resulted in corporate email accounts being compromised is one example of Microsoft's failings, which the company hasn't shown any significant response to.

"If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago ... [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies" instead of making it the default, Grotto said. "As a result, it was really hard for agencies to identify their exposure to the SolarWinds breach."

Grotto further explained that Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the US government, illustrating the power Microsoft has over the US federal government. So, what can be done? According to Grotto the US government needs to incentivise competition within the IT space to attract more vendors to reduce Microsoft's grip on the market. Additionally, Grotto believes that Microsoft needs to be publicly scrutinized when when it makes a mistake.

"At the end of the day, Microsoft, any company, is going to respond most directly to market incentives," Grotto told us. "Unless this scrutiny generates changed behavior among its customers who might want to look elsewhere, then the incentives for Microsoft to change are not going to be as strong as they should be."