Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, told a panel of senators on Tuesday that his company estimates the cybersecurity breach of nine federal agencies and 100 private companies likely took "at least a thousand" skilled and capable people to pull off. "At Microsoft as we worked with customers that had been impacted by this, we stepped back and just analyzed all of the engineering steps that we had seen and we asked ourselves how many engineers do we believed had worked on this collective effort and the answer we came to was at least a thousand,” Smith told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "I should say at least a thousand very skilled, capable engineers. So we haven’t seen this kind of sophistication matched with this kind of scale," he added.