Microsoft hires Chinese engineers to run intelligence project

Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the U.S. Department of Defense ’s computer systems, ProPublica reports. The engineers are given minimal oversight by U.S. employees, leaving some of the country’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hackers.

Secret Pentagon project recruits engineers from China online. Photo: Pro Publica

According to the investigation, the Chinese engineer only needed to submit an online application and meet the recruiter through the Microsoft Teams application. This Chinese engineer could send commands to servers in the US, creating an opportunity to insert malicious code without the supervisor realizing it.

“If someone runs a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ and it actually does something malicious, [the escort] won’t know anything,” Matthew Erickson, a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica via email.

The deal, which was crucial to Microsoft winning federal government cloud computing contracts more than a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to monitor work and act as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to supervise foreign engineers with much more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are military veterans with little programming experience and are paid little more than minimum wage.

In interviews, former government officials said they had never heard of the digital escort service. The program appears to be so little known that even the Defense Department’s IT agency has trouble finding people knowledgeable about it.

“No one seems to know anything about this program, so I don’t know what to do next,” said Deven King, a spokesman for the Defense Information Systems Agency.

National security and cybersecurity experts contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an agreement existed, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital capabilities as a top threat to the country.

Following a Pro Publica report that Microsoft was using engineers in China to help maintain cloud computing systems for the US Department of Defense, the company said it has made changes to ensure this will no longer happen.

“Foreign engineers — from any country, including China — should ‘never’ be allowed to maintain or access Pentagon systems,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X.

Responding to reporters on this issue on July 18 - Microsoft's communications director Frank X. Shaw replied: "In response to concerns raised earlier this week about foreign engineers supervised by the United States, Microsoft has made changes to our support services for US Government customers to ensure that no China-based engineering teams provide technical support for the Department of Defense Government cloud and related services."