Digital vandalism is a serious provocation—a casus belli under some circumstances—and the cyberattack on Microsoft Exchange affected tens of thousands of companies.
The episode recalled the massive cyberattacks on Google just over a decade ago, when intruders came close to stealing the company’s source code, prompting it to pull its search engine from China. But whereas Google had numerous run-ins with Chinese censors before exiting, Microsoft has sought to be a model of corporate compliance in China, where it operates its largest research and development center in the world outside the U.S.
So, if Microsoft can be treated by Beijing in this way, the thinking is that no U.S. company can consider itself safe.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, commenting on the attacks, condemned what he called “digital authoritarianism,” a framing that echoed President Joe Biden’s way of looking at U.S.-China competition as a “democracies-versus-autocrats” struggle for global leadership in the 21st century.
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