Critical that we step back and assess the significance

 It’s critical that we step back and assess the significance of these attacks in their full context. This is not “espionage as usual,” even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world’s critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation’s intelligence agency. While the most recent attack appears to reflect a particular focus on the United States and many other democracies, it also provides a powerful reminder that people in virtually every country are at risk and need protection irrespective of the governments they live under.

As we have now seen repeatedly, Silicon Valley is not the only home of ingenious software developers. Russian engineers in 2016 identified weaknesses in password protection and social media platforms, hacked their way into American political campaigns, and used disinformation to sow divisions among the electorate. They repeated the exercise in the 2017 French presidential campaign. As tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Digital Crimes Unit, these techniques have impacted victims in more than 70 countries, including most of the world’s democracies. The most recent attack reflects an unfortunate but similarly ingenious capability to identify weaknesses in computer science average salary protection and exploit them.