Microsoft is relying on engineers inside China to assist with maintenance of United States Defense Department’s computer systems, according to a ProPublica investigation published July 15.

The relationship between Microsoft and the Department of Defense goes back decades. In 2019, the company won a multibillion-dollar contract for the Defense Department’s jedi (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud computing, which transitioned in 2022 into the jwcc (Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability) contract.

Microsoft’s business model relies partly on top-tier foreign engineers in China. As a barrier against sabotage and spying, Microsoft employs American citizens with security clearances—called “digital escorts”—to supervise the work of the foreign engineers.

The trouble is the digital escorts are generally former military personnel who have little coding expertise and are thus ill-equipped to police the work of the foreign coding experts. “We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious,” one Microsoft escort told ProPublica on condition of anonymity. “But we really can’t tell.”

Matthew Erickson, a former Microsoft employee who worked in the escort system, told ProPublica how easily most of the American escorts could be duped: “If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea.”

Microsoft says it has kept the Defense Department in the loop about the digital escorts program. But the Defense Department’s IT branch told ProPublica that it was unable to find anyone in the department who was aware of the program’s details. “Literally no one seems to know anything about this, so I don’t know where to go from here,” Deven King, spokesman for the Defense Information Systems Agency, was quoted as saying.

This new report is especially alarming since China was recently designated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as “the “most active and persistent cyberthreat to U.S. government, private-sector and critical infrastructure networks.” And evidence proving the accuracy of this designation has been abundant. In recent years:

• Chinese operatives secretly planted microchips the size of a grain of rice on numerous server motherboards used by the Department of Homeland Security, both houses of Congress and nasa.
• Chinese hackers planted “web shell,” a toxic script that grants remote access to servers, inside infrastructure on Guam and other U.S. locations.
• Chinese operatives infiltrated the e-mail accounts of numerous senior U.S. ambassadors, downloading some 60,000 e-mails.
• Chinese government-linked hackers breached several major American telecommunications companies in a quest for sensitive national security information.

These were all major breaches with implications that are still not fully understood. Yet some cycbersecurity experts believe Microsoft’s use of Chinese engineers to help maintain the Defense Department’s systems poses an even greater threat to America’s national security than these past infiltrations.

“If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access. We need to be very concerned about that,” Harry Coker, a former senior executive at the cia and the National Security Agency, told ProPublica.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has warned for decades about the perils of the U.S. military’s dependence on computer systems that are vulnerable to enemy sabotage. In a January 1995 Trumpet article, he quoted analyst Joseph de Courcy, who labeled this dependence “the Western world’s Achilles’ heel.” This was an allusion to the nearly invincible figure in Greek mythology who was vulnerable only on his heel.

“America is the greatest superpower this world has ever known,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “But we have a very vulnerable point in our military—our own Achilles’ heel.” This vulnerability “is so dangerous that I am amazed it hasn’t received more publicity” (ibid).

Mr. Flurry said de Courcy’s warning about this vulnerability reminded him of a Bible prophecy in Ezekiel 7. The chapter’s first three verses show that God is addressing “the land of Israel” in the time of “the end,” which refers mainly to the U.S. and Britain in the modern age. (You can understand this by studying our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.)

Ezekiel 7 describes a future era when God will punish these nations for their “abominations” and their hatred of His law and authority (verse 8). Verse 14 describes one aspect of that punishment: “They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”

Mr. Flurry called this an “alarming” scripture about a time in the near future when U.S. military technology will be compromised by enemies. “It seems everybody is expecting our people to go into battle, but the greatest tragedy imaginable occurs!” Mr. Flurry wrote. “Nobody goes to battle—even though the trumpet is blown! Will it be because of a computer terrorist?”

Isaiah 59 gives more details about the same age of chaos and conflict. In verses 9 and 10, the people of America and Britain are shown to be without vision: “[W]e wait for light, but behold obscurity; [we wait] for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.”

This passage is true in a spiritual sense: The U.S. and Britain are already in spiritual blindness. But it may also have a specific physical fulfillment. After computer networks of vital government institutions, such as the Department of Defense, are infiltrated by hackers from China and other enemy countries, the computer-dependent government would be in the dark.

In the June 1999 issue of the Trumpet, Mr. Flurry again discussed the U.S. military’s dangerous vulnerability to cyberattacks, writing, “We could lose the next war before we even begin.”

To understand more about the dangers of this threat and the hope connected to these developments, order your free copy of Mr. Flurry’s book Ezekiel—The End-Time Prophet.