The U.S. Department of Defense is replacing its long-standing cybersecurity program protecting its global IT network with commercially available Microsoft software, according to Newsweek. This is despite widespread opposition and criticism from industry professionals, who fear it will make the nation more vulnerable to cyberweapons and espionage attacks by hostile nations.
During a series of meetings with the DOD CIO last fall, it became clear that the vast majority of senior IT leaders from the armed services were opposed to the move as the department finalized its fiscal year 2024 budget request.
Potential dangers were exposed in March when it was discovered that hackers believed to be working for Russian military intelligence had been quietly exploiting a flaw in Outlook, Microsoft’s email program, for nearly a year.
The Department of Defense’s (DOD) decision to move forward with the switch to Microsoft security tools, based on an assessment from the National Security Agency (NSA), has shed new light on old concerns about the safety of software developed by the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant and the effects of its monopoly on government technology markets.
Since 2017, all of the Department of Defense’s four million or so desktop computers have run only Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and the department has made extensive use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services. Its 2.1 million active-duty and reserve service members and 750,000 civilian workers rely on Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products for routine office administration tasks like email, scheduling, and word processing.
One of the Defense Department’s cyber officials, Deputy CIO David McKeown, confirmed to Newsweek that the agency would begin using Microsoft Defender, a suite of security applications included with the company’s premium software licenses. He wrote in an email that “Microsoft Defender will provide DOD an integrated cybersecurity solution that promises to satisfy most, if not all, of the capabilities we require” to protect the military’s networks. He pushed back against the idea that the DOD would be less secure if it used Microsoft’s own security tools to protect Microsoft software, arguing instead that tools designed from the ground up to integrate with the software they were protecting would be safer.
Microsoft reportedly told Newsweek that it is in the best position to defend its own products because it has access to so much information from its billions of users around the world.