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U.S. Military Used Fake Chinese Networking - FBI
therawfeed.com — A two-year FBI probe called Operation Cisco Raider discovered the use of some 3,500 counterfeit Cisco Systems network components made in China. The FBI says it doesn't know whether or not the fake goods were part of a Chinese spy program. Such fake gear could potentially allow China to jam U.S. network equipment or make it easier to hack.
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- Fangsinmybeard, on 05/09/2008, -0/+2Looks like we're getting screwed in a big clusterF@#k. This country will be in third world status before ya can swing a hung dead president.
- aki009, on 05/09/2008, -0/+3Fake hardware is a fact of life. However, most of the time their presence is obvious to those working with the hardware, so one (or more) of the following must be true: they were incompetent, chose not to speak up, or the copy was a high quality one, effectively duplicating the real thing.
Now I don't expect the last to apply (high quality duplicate), because the very reason fake hardware gets put out there is to provide a nice margin for the middle-man. Making the copy high quality will increase its cost, perhaps to the point that the potential profit no longer balances out the risk of prison and fines.
From an intelligence standpoint, if someone has access to hardware before they go to somebody you want to spy on, the way to hack them is to modify a genuine box, not a fake one. This for the simple reason that the latter is indistinguishable from any other similar hardware until you pop the easter egg. The last thing to do would be to use fake hardware that's easy to pick out once you know what you're looking for.
So, my conclusion is that approaching this topic from the foreign intelligence agency aspect is merely done to get more clicks, and belongs in the same category as flashing flesh and showing gore to sell more evening news.
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