Microsoft Corporation is one of the longer established publicly listed high-technology companies within the North American 'big tech' industry.

Its foundation pre-dates the wave of internet giants that rose to prominence at the beginning of this millennium by such a margin that it was in existence and already a major corporation before many of the leaders of other tech firms around the world were actually born.

Microsoft's corporate standing differs from many of its peers in many other ways, too. Not only is it based in Seattle, its original homeland, as opposed to Silicon Valley in the next state westward, but it also manufactures computer hardware components as well as software, marking it out as a comprehensive provider of all aspects of the computer science industry. It could be fair to consider that Microsoft was viewed as a potential direct rival for Apple when Apple was founded just one year later, in 1976.

Since then, the two have been at the very top of their commercial game. However, Microsoft has recently been going from strength to strength, which is a remarkable feat considering its wranglings with anti-competition authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States, two of its vital markets.

This week, however, a further matter of interest has surfaced, adding to the ongoing market value speculation surrounding the viability of Microsoft's proposals to acquire electronic entertainment company Activision Blizzard for almost $69 billion, which has been an ongoing matter since the beginning of 2022.

As Microsoft's stock made an overall upward movement during the course of last year in the face of anti-competition authorities putting the brakes on the progress of the company's plans to acquire Activision Blizzard, the new year arrived with the deal still not complete and the American authorities sticking firmly to their premise that such an acquisition would create the largest corporate entity in the video game industry worldwide, potentially lessening the ability for other globally established companies such as Sony to compete in the market with its Playstation range of video games.

This matter rumbled on within the United States, but the British authorities made their decision to approve the merger later last year.

Microsoft stock is at an all-time high, having concluded the trading day on Friday last week with the FXOpen chart showing a value of just above the $398 mark at the end of the US trading session before stock markets closed for the weekend.

The immediate road ahead for Microsoft stock appears very interesting indeed, given its upward run, which has placed its stock at the highest value by a large margin, given the recent reports that some of the company's senior executives have allegedly had their emails accessed by hackers which are being considered by mainstream media to be associated with the cyber attack which took place in 2020 in certain US Federal Government departments when user credentials of SolarWinds software were exploited.

In some reports, the security breach that Microsoft allegedly suffered and has now come to light was originally discovered by Microsoft on January 12 this year and is being considered as a possible nation-state attack on Microsoft, which took place just a few days after a major security overhaul.

If this is the case, it could potentially expose Microsoft, whose core business is advanced enterprise software, as vulnerable to internal security issues and data breaches, which is an interesting position when it comes to how the market could view such a matter.

Currently, Microsoft stock is at a very high point, with a year of impressive and seemingly unstoppable growth behind it. However, the next few days ahead may well be worth monitoring, considering that cyber-attacks such as this on a major computer systems and software manufacturer whose products are the default operating systems for most businesses of all sizes globally are not small news at all!

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