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Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

(www.csoonline.com)
433 points zdw | 6 comments | 21 Oct 25 15:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom
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crmd ◴[21 Oct 25 19:41 UTC] No.45660666[source]▶
One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop.

If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlated with me hating the engineering culture of an organization.

I know I am excluding a lot of companies with great engineering culture where I would thrive and who just happen to use Outlook/Sharepoint/Teams, etc. but it has had such better predictive power of rotten tech culture than any line of questioning I have come up with during interviews that I still use it.

I don’t mean any disrespect to MSFT-centric engineers out there - it’s not you it’s me.

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jojobas ◴[21 Oct 25 21:58 UTC] No.45662254[source]▶
Too bad Microsoft shops run the world. All the factories and shops, nearly every commercial backoffice runs windows, office/exchange and what not.
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1. a-dub ◴[21 Oct 25 22:56 UTC] No.45662787[source]▶
the software is so bad it's literally a national security risk.
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2. mrsmrtss ◴[22 Oct 25 11:30 UTC] No.45667507[source]▶
While I may agree on Sharepoint, not everything from Microsoft is bad. Often the alternatives are even worse.
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3. dijit ◴[22 Oct 25 13:23 UTC] No.45668761[source]▶
Really?

Libreoffice Calc and Excel are probably your strongest argument, Excel runs the world after all.

But, if it wasn’t for incompatibility and fear of incompatibility- I have a hard time thinking Calc is materially worse; I doubt theres a single workflow not possible in Calc- and if O365 utils get worse looking then Calc will win there too soon enough.

For everything else in the microsoft stack, either its “this thing does many things thus is incomparable to any one thing!” or its simply worse.

Even the best tools that I would actively defend (MSSQL) are only equivalent to other solutions (PGSQL) and almost never better than everything offered elsewhere.

4. a-dub ◴[22 Oct 25 17:30 UTC] No.45672392[source]▶
ok, excluding things they have bought and not yet destroyed. what's good? (we'll accept that xbox is good, distinct and unrelated to the rest of their offerings)
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5. jojobas ◴[22 Oct 25 23:10 UTC] No.45676323{3}[source]▶
Is there a one stop solution for email, calendars, bookings etc that could run on premise?
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6. dijit ◴[23 Oct 25 09:36 UTC] No.45679966{4}[source]▶
Zimbra, Nextcloud Hub, MDaemon (Mail/Cal/Contacts), Group Office and Kopano come immediately to mind.