Last week Microsoft announced that it would no longer use engineering teams based in China to support the Cloud Computing systems of the Ministry of Defense, after the investigation of Propublica to practice, of which cyber security experts said the government could expose the government to hacking and spiritage.
But it turns out that the Pentagon was not the only part of the government that was confronted with such a threat. For years, Microsoft also uses its global workforce, including the staff based in China, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of justice, treasury and trade, Propublica has discovered.
This work has taken place in what is known as the Cloud government community, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nevertheless sensitive. The federal risk and authorization management program, the cloud accreditation organization of the US government, has approved GCC to process “moderate” impact information “whereby the loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability would lead to a serious adverse effect on the activities, assets or individuals of an agency.”
The Antitrust department of the Ministry of Justice has used GCC to support its criminal and civilian research and process functions, according to a report of 2022. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Ministry of Education also used GCC.
Microsoft says that his foreign engineers who work in GCC are supervised by the American staff known as 'digital escorts', similar to the system it had at the Ministry of Defense.
Nevertheless, CyberSecurity -Experts Propublica told that foreign support for GCC offers a chance to spy and sabotage. “There is a misconception that if government data is not classified, there can be no harm of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cyber security officer who is now Chief Information Security Officer of the Technology Company Sailpoint.
“With so much data stored in cloud services – and the power of AI to analyze it quickly – cannot even reveal insights that can harm the American interests,” he said.
