“We can’t help but feel this change is long overdue,” Koessel told CNN, adding that some of his past investigations into hacks of customers have been frustrated by a lack of data.
The free tools announced on Wednesday “will enable incident response teams, regardless of license level, to conduct more complete investigations,” Sean Koessel, a vice president at Volexity, told CNN.
With customers worldwide and more data than most other firms in the security industry, Microsoft’s decision could have a broad impact on the security posture of its customers, analysts said. Until now, Microsoft’s business model has involved charging customers extra for access to these logs. Logs, or computer files that gather artifacts about a hack, are critical to understanding and thwarting cyberattacks, according to experts. One of the victims of the hack was a human rights organization that could not detect the activity because they were not paying for a premium software license, according to US cybersecurity firm Volexity, which works with the human rights organization. The email accounts of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and State Department officials were breached in the activity, CNN has reported. The State Department says it detected the cyber activity in June and reported it to Microsoft. The campaign hit two-dozen organizations and became public last week. The move comes after cybersecurity officials privately expressed frustration that Microsoft had not done enough to detect the alleged Chinese cyber-espionage campaign, according to US officials. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Microsoft’s policy change. Starting in September, Microsoft cloud computing customers won’t have to pay extra money to get access to critical data to help them spot cyberattacks, Microsoft said Wednesday. Microsoft is offering free cybersecurity tools to some government and commercial customers following criticism of the tech giant’s handling of a major alleged Chinese hack that compromised US government email accounts.
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