Ride the Lightning

Cisco's Customers Screw With NSA by Using Dummy Drops

March 25, 2015

Network World recently reported that some Cisco customers have taken steps to evade the NSA's tampering with Cisco equipment while it is en route to them.

The NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group, as revealed by Edward Snowden, was inserting backdoor surveillance tools into routers, servers and networking equipment before the equipment was repackaged and sent to customers outside the U.S.

Cisco has begun shipping equipment to addresses that are unrelated to a customer, said John Stewart, Cisco’s chief security and trust officer, during a panel session at the Cisco Live conference in Melbourne. Hopefully, that makes it hard for the NSA to target an individual company.

One of the leaked Snowden documents, dated June 2010, has two photos of an NSA interdiction operation, with a box that says Cisco on the side.

The document, labeled top secret, goes on to say that supply-chain interdiction operations “are some of the most productive operations in TAO, because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.”

In May 2014, Cisco CEO John Chambers sent a letter to President Obama, arguing that the NSA’s alleged actions undermine trust with its customers and more broadly hurt the U.S. technology industry. Cisco also stated that it does not work with any government to intentionally weaken its products.

Ah, the games we play to foil our own government – and who knows what devices are purchased from foreign sources and intercepted in a similar fashion? These days only a fool would buy a flash drive made in China – so be careful of those flash drives that are handed out liberally by vendors as tchotchke at conferences!

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