China may have had access to sensitive Department of Defense (DOD) systems for over a decade, according to a recent investigation.

Pray for your fellow intercessor.

View Comments (3)

From CBN:

Beijing’s potential “in” to DOD networks didn’t come in the form of a cyber-attack, or a rogue agent inside the government, but rather Microsoft employees based in China, operating under the oversight of under-trained U.S.-based supervisors.

“These Microsoft engineers based in mainland China were feeding code to what were called Digital Escorts. So these were DOD employees with security clearances. They’re able to take the code that was produced by Microsoft engineers and then put it directly into DOD systems,” said Jack Burnham, a research analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

While these Microsoft employees are not known Chinese agents, according to a ProPublica investigation, many of the digital escorts tasked with patching their work into DOD systems report being ill-equipped to understand the code they receive.

So, in other words, Chinese employees overseas were sending code that was eventually patched into DOD systems. The DOD employees didn’t fully understand the code they were sent, meaning the Chinese could have potentially added vulnerabilities and backdoors that ended up in key military networks.

Burnham notes that, in addition to the security concern described this setup also allowed Chinese engineers to develop extensive knowledge of our military systems. Why were we ever allowing citizens of China, a nation interested in replacing America as the world’s premiere superpower, to work with sensitive military systems?

Luckily, CBN notes that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is putting a stop to this immediately:

Effective immediately, he says China will no longer have any involvement in DOD Cloud services, and he’s ordered a two-week review of all other Pentagon systems.

Secretary Hegseth’s response is an answer to our prayers, but we can’t let up on intercession yet. Let’s pray for God to protect our military from any and all cyberthreats, and for all vulnerabilities to be addressed!

Share your prayers for our nation’s cybersecurity below.

(Excerpt from CBN. Photo Credit: Matthieu Beaumont on Unsplash)