CHINA WATCHHow Microsoft’s “Little Workaround” Created a Major Pentagon Threat
Reporter Renee Dudley heard Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it.
Description
A source told reporter Renee Dudley something she found hard to believe: that Microsoft was running tech support for the Department of Defense through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary. The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.
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Transcript
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Jessica Lussenhop: ProPublica. Investigative journalism in the public interest.
I have, like most people, I assume, a pretty healthy fear of getting hacked. Ugh, even saying that out loud makes me nervous, like I’m speaking it into existence … but it’s become this fact of our online lives. I’ve gotten three alerts this year about my personal information being hacked.
Nobody’s hacking me, to be clear. I’m not important or rich enough for that. People are hacking the big companies I trusted to keep my information safe. And there’s seemingly nothing I can do about it! Nothing except complain.
Renee Dudley: Everybody loves to complain about Microsoft.
Lussenhop: Really?
Dudley: Yeah.
Lussenhop: This is my ProPublica colleague, who does a lot more than complain when she learns about a big hack.
Dudley: I’m Renee Dudley, and I am a cybersecurity and technology reporter at ProPublica.
Lussenhop: Lately Renee’s been more like our Microsoft reporter.
Dudley: Techies have long held that Microsoft is a legacy company with weaknesses that are just waiting to be exploited by hackers.
Lussenhop: Microsoft is one of the world’s biggest companies and a major supplier of technology to one very important customer.
Dudley: The federal government is actually one of Microsoft’s biggest, if not its biggest, customer and has been for years.
Lussenhop: The Pentagon uses Microsoft for email, calendars, storing files. And Microsoft’s weaknesses that everyone loves to complain about? They’ve already been exploited by our biggest cyber adversaries.
Like in 2017, we learned North Korean hackers targeted 150 countries including the U.S. and the U.K.— creating mayhem in the British health service. In 2020, we learned Russian hackers got access to reams of sensitive U.S. government data. And then there’s China — our most active and persistent cyberthreat. In 2023, Chinese government-backed hackers were able to get their hands on about 60,000 State Department emails from Microsoft Outlook.
