Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

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.

How can you see from the MX record if it is Microsoft?

The "dig" command can get them for you

$ dig ycombinator.com mx

  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 20 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
  ycombinator.com. 300 IN MX 30 aspmx4.googlemail.com.