It’s Not Just Crappy Components You Should Worry About
Instapundit points to a post on Strategy Page that discusses some of the national security risks of counterfeit telecommunications and computing hardware and software:
Information Warfare: China Counterfeit Surprise
China Counterfeit Surprise January 4, 2008: One reason China tolerates the widespread manufacture of counterfeit products is because some of them have some military benefit for China’s Cyber War effort. This came to light recently when the FBI arrested two Americans for running a computer parts company that was selling counterfeit computer parts (especially Cisco router components), manufactured in China. The phony parts had counterfeit labels, and were delivered in counterfeit boxes. The two brothers had a contract to sell these parts to the Department of Defense and other government agencies.
You may recall the other problems encountered recently with computer components (some NOT counterfeit!):
(from TechRepublic)
Seagate has issued a warning about Trojan Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah that has infected a number of shipped hard drives.
(from Freedom to Tinker blog and Wikipedia)
Over the weekend a Finnish researcher named Muzzy noticed a potential vulnerability in the web-based uninstaller that Sony offers to users who want to remove the First4Internet XCP copy protection software.
I’m sure there are quite a few more reports of this kind of incident.
