Microsoft urges Donald Trump to ‘push harder’ against Russia and China hacks

Microsoft’s president has called on Donald Trump to “push harder” against cyber attacks from Russia, China and Iran amid a wave of state-sponsored hacks targeting US government officials and election campaigns.

Brad Smith, who is also the Big Tech company’s vice chair and top legal officer, told the Financial Times that cyber security “deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations” and appealed to the US president-elect to send a “strong message”.

“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.”

Ransomware attacks against US businesses have surged in recent years, often perpetrated by criminal gangs that Smith said were “tolerated . . . and in some cases even facilitated” by the Russian government.

Last week, US law enforcement agencies accused China of mounting a widespread cyber espionage campaign, by breaking into several American telecoms networks in the run-up to this month’s election.

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