Microsoft's Bret Arsenault, who serves as its top cybersecurity executive, discussed the top issues facing his company and its clients, and offers advice for smaller firms on how they can get better at eliminating the simplest, most devastating attacks.
He talked to CNBC on the perils of the role, making quick decisions and the surprisingly simply steps companies can take to be more secure.
Arsenault quickly jumped on a phone call with staff in Eastern Europe and the U.S. He demanded his staff shut off access to Ukraine within 10 minutes to stop the malicious software from spreading out of Microsoft's locations in that country. He might have the hardest cybersecurity job in the world, being accountable to the board of one of the world's largest tech companies, which supplies ubiquitous products and software that serve most other companies across the globe.
"We all sort of declared years ago that identity would be our new perimeter. People are very focused on taking advantage of identity, it's become a classic: hackers don't break in, they log in. I see that as a huge, huge thing for us to work on," he said. "The reality is, we still see a lot of attempts of people trying to password spray. The best way to protect against the password spray is to just eliminate passwords. If you have passwords, you have to enable multi-factor authentication" -- that is, using a password in combination with another form of identification, like a random set of numbers texted to the user's phone.
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