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Florida Tech CEO Indicted for Selling $1B Worth of Counterfeit Cisco Equipment
- colechristensen 4y agoPerfect way to introduce malware into foreign networks: release modified pirated Cisco software for counterfeiters
- the_biot 4y agoDon't knock it as a business model: cloned hardware and pirated Cisco software is how Huawei got their start in the networking business. I don't know if they did malware/spyware in the beginning, but the assumption that they do now has caught up to them though.
- gfv 4y agoIt was Nortel, IIRC.
- Lammy 4y agoThat's probably why the Justice Department are so keen to go after these grey-market sellers: it protects NSA's own interdiction pipeline more than it protects Cisco's bottom line: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoAll of the above? It's good for the entire country to not use counterfeit network equipment manufactured by an adversary.
- tendstofortytwo 4y agoHeadline made it sound like the CEO of the Florida Institute of Technology. Which... didn't make a lot of sense, but worth pointing out that "Tech" modified "CEO", not "Florida".
- trhway 4y ago> Customers of Aksoy’s fraudulent and counterfeit devices included hospitals, schools, government agencies, and the military. the places where IT is far from the best to say the least, and bureaucracy is the strongest. Natural "marks" for such a con.
- rconti 4y agoIt's almost as if always chasing the low bid has consequences!
- thret 4y agoIf you sell devices secretly modified in China to the military and it comes out that you knew about it... I wonder if this constitutes treason?
- adrr 4y agoYou would think the military would have requirements on the chain of custody for network equipment.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoStrange - charged with one or two counts of this and that. And not 10's of thousands of counts. Is that normal?
- wmf 4y agoYeah, prosecutors generally charge only counts that they can really prove and only enough counts to put someone away for a "reasonable" time. Imagine a jury having to listen to evidence for a thousand counts, keep them straight, and decide each of them at the end.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- imglorp 4y agoHere's one argument against building your own infra on prem.
- alar44 4y agoLol yup that's why I only use cloud for my L2 switching.
- gerdesj 4y agoI have a member of staff in the cloud with a torch and a pair of binos. Back in the office we have the same setup. We run at half duplex and avoid all that CSMA thing for speed. We have shrunk the address part of the Ethernet II frames to one bit and removed quite a few flags. With some extra compression, we can do nearly one frame every few minutes, depending on how often you have to look up our extensions designed to save time. To wind up the troops, I run nmap scans every now and then from my PC. It takes days to complete. lol.
- SamuelAdams 4y agoI think this highlights a larger problem with technical equipment. Why is it still so difficult for end users to verify if hardware they purchased is genuine? Most PC manufacturers have some sort of sticker / device ID that you send to their website. That isn’t perfect but it is an attempt. Are there other software based solutions that do a better job of solving this problem?
- lowlevel 4y agoWonder if Rogers bought any.
- hash872 4y agoMarginally related but I've always wanted to discuss this- I met a guy whose small business (he claims) is purchasing networking equipment from the same Chinese factories that manufacture Cisco/other networking company products. He told me that he obviously just purchases in much smaller amounts, slaps his brand on it, and then has a small number of salespeople sell them throughout the US (he claimed to specialize in school districts and universities). He said his prices were lower than Cisco's (or other companies) because he has much less overhead. I think he was born in China, so he may have an in with whoever these factories are, possibly via personal connection. I can't verify some of his story, but he does legitimately run a small, closely held business selling networking gear. And he is clearly wealthy. Would be sort of a cool business hack if true!
- ethbr0 4y agoIf "business hack" = stealing someone else's designs, I've got a lot of profitable opportunities for you...
- KyeRussell 4y agoZuck is doing just fine.
- duxup 4y agoThe buyers must know. The quirks / bugs of various networking companies equipment is well known. I wonder if the buyers are possibly defrauding their employers…
- newsclues 4y agoOf course they are.
- rconti 4y agoHe's probably not just selling stolen hardware designs, he's probably also selling illegally copied software!
- silisili 4y agoOne thing I always try to remember is not to buy or sell electronics in Miami. Every time a "person" from Miami has purchased a device from me online, it turned out to be the address of some shady forwarding/shipping company. They take forever and lose things, so the actual buyer may file a claim they never got the item. Thankfully, Swappa caught on and put some rules in place recently. Basically, the buyer must disclose this, and once it's delivered to said forwarder, the transaction is done. Every time I've purchased a phone from a seller in Miami, it's been fraudulent in some way. Typically, phones being sold as new that have very obvious pry marks near the screen. Beautiful city, but something about it seems to attract the shadiest businesses.
- walrus01 4y agoa city with a large portion of its development built on laundered cocaine money and the drug import trade has many shady businesses? [surprisedpikachu.gif] I'm sure all that money buying all of those $500,000+ yachts from south florida yacht dealers is totally legit
- kmacdough 4y agoMinimal regulations, but more importantly, practically zero enforcement. I remember a local electrician saying stuff like "ah just don't tell anyone and it'll be fine". I was utterly unsurprised, if devastated, when the apartment complex collapsed. It's best to keep regulations lean and manageable, so we don't waste tons on unnecessary work and triple-checks, but regulations they exist for a very good reason. Anyone who claims "regulations" are anti-business forget that business aren't the core of countries OR economies. People are. The only people who benefit from deregulation are the ones who own the businesses.
- autoexec 4y agoI love regulations, but there's a legitimate problem that large and entrenched businesses can write their own laws and bribe politicians to pass them and/or appoint their own into regulatory agencies. It allows businesses to put insane regulations in place just to keep competitors away and leaves them to police themselves which works as well as you'd expect. Regulations are a tool. Useful as hammers, but just as painful if applied incorrectly.
- chx 4y agoExplain to me how you can counterfeit Cisco equipment. I truly don't get it. I might be naive but I would have thought they have custom ASICs in their products and then where are you going to get them if not from Cisco?
- wmf 4y agoLow-end Cisco products use off-the-shelf chips; I assume these are the ones being counterfeited.
- aosmith 4y agoThere are a few tiers of fake products. The same is roughly true for sneakers, handbags, etc. (A) Real products that are being sold on the black market, think of these as stolen from the factory. They're cheaper because nobody is paying the royalties. (B) High quality knock offs that are made at the same factory with the same materials and tools. These might be slightly less well made. (C) What you think of as fake. Just junk. Most people encounter A and B without ever knowing it.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoThese knock-offs of Cisco 2960X's definitely fall into category B. They'd be next to impossible to identify in the field: https://www.servethehome.com/fake-cisco-switches-in-the-supply-chain-uncovered/ https://www.servethehome.com/fake-cisco-switches-in-the-supp...
- phpisthebest 4y agoThere is also Grey Market, goods sold at a discount in other nations then reimported back to the US, dont know if that popular with enterprise gear but it for sure is with consumer electronics, and other product groups (like books which is legal now thanks to the US Supreme court)
- aosmith 4y agoThat's category A...
- yalogin 4y agoPlease correct me if I am wrong but a lot of these illegal and scammy looking business seem to originate in Florida. Not sure how correct I am in that observation
- Pakdef 4y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but it is not my impression... keep in mind that Florida is a very populous state though (3rd), so it should get more then most other states if you go by percentage... Also, when it is a Florida story, they tend to include the State name first in the title (i.e.: "Florida Man" stories) and not include it at all for some other states.
- crmd 4y agoEveryone I’ve been introduced to from Miami claims to be some permutation of stripper, real estate agent, DJ, and/or crypto investor. Seems like some wild shit going on down there.
- Barrin92 4y agoliterally the first thing I thought of was a story the NYT ran last month about "e-pimps" in Miami. Is there a name for this, the GTA economy? Rosero has a long and colorful résumé. Born in Florida to parents from Colombia, he served in the military, worked as a stripper and imported ponchos from South America. He started Think Expansion in 2017, employing a mix of friends and salespeople he found on forums. They helped generate leads and build social media accounts for any company that came calling: yacht merchants, medical billers, insurance companies, lawyers, influencers, even multilevel-marketing firms. He’s a born hustler whose personal hero is Jordan Belfort; his speech is peppered with a mix of marketing jargon (“lowering the action threshold”) and impressions of film and cartoon characters, sometimes in the same sentence. “My mission is to stop Dr. Evil at all costs!” he said in 2019 in an interview with a local news site. “Haha, something like that — I’m a digital entrepreneur.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/magazine/e-pimps-onlyfans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/magazine/e-pimps-onlyfans...
- CSMastermind 4y agoOn that thread I started typing out a comment to people generalizing Miami to all of Florida, but I didn't make it far enough to post it. We'll see if my thoughts are well formed enough to post it this time: Miami is its own world. Florida has several distinct cultures within it. The "pure florida essence" is central Florida around Tampa and Orlando. Miami is a separate and distinct culture as are northern Florida (southern Georgia) and the panhandle. These sorts of cultural distinctions exist in several states. Seattle is different than Spokane. The cultures of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, and Mendocino are all noticeably different. Texas has at least 6 subcultures represented within its borders. But Miami is different from the rest of the state (and country) to a degree that can be hard to appreciate unless you've lived there and have a good base of experience to compare it to. It's a scammer's paradise. The general feeling seems to be that rules and laws are for suckers. The less you follow the rules, the better of a job you're doing. Silicon Valley often gets criticized for its disregard for the rules, but I've always found that disregard to be for rules they feel (fairly or not) are poorly formed, inefficient, or standing in the way of progress. In Miami you break rules as a form of virtual signaling. Conspicuously consuming isn't just accepted, it's expected. I would love to see a historian or anthropologist do a deep dive on how that culture got that way. I know that a lot of people will point to the cocaine trade but I think it goes deeper than that.
- adave 4y agoWell Miami, the golden city of fraudsters, dealers and epimps.Such a lovely city reduced to these conmen.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago>city reduced to these conmen. Not so lovely built from these.
- bigcat12345678 4y agoThe title is, to me, 10x the impact of the event. Per the actual deeds, the person earned a revenue of 100m from the equipment, with millions of profit gained from the sales. The equipments' market price tag adds up to 1B. Which suggest authentic Cisco equipment is 10X the price. I did not actually really everything, and don't know if the sold equipment is of lower quality. But just from the 10X price difference, I think Cisco needs to be disrupted...
- gfv 4y agoIt's not unheard of getting Cisco to give you discounts on hardware as deep as 80-85%, provided you're able to commit to buy a lot of equipment -- say, several millions $ per year. Other major networking equipment manufacturers have similar policies. If you're a small company, you have basically two options: the first is that you buy the big three equipment through a distributor with a lower discount. The other way is to recognize that the vast majority of the modern switches -- even brand name ones -- have very similar hardware: they're basically an x86 computer with a Broadcom switching/routing chip bolted on through PCI-E. Broadcom sells their chips on the open market, so you can get relatively cheap switch hardware from a less known vendor (FS, Quanta, Mellanox at least until recently), and install a networking operating system such as Sonic. However, you'll be on the hook for supporting and debugging it yourself. There are intermediate options like using the switch's vendor operating system, but you probably won't get support at the big three level -- no next business day replacement, no TAC handholding (Not that the bar is too high.) This is a dealbreaker for many: you want your network to be solid, or at least have access to people able to quickly troubleshoot the arising issues. It's easy with Cisco, slighly less so with Juniper, and practically impossible with whiteboxes. Basically, Cisco is the IBM of 1970s: nobody gets fired for buying it, and the only thing they should fear is accidentally disrupting themselves. With the recent chip shortage, lead times on the big three gear shot up, so there is a prime chance for Chinese manufacturers (Huawei, H3C) to step up and fulfill the need -- at least outside of US and Europe.
- georgia_peach 4y agoThere's been higher quality & lower cost gear on the market for ages, but it's the modern version of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Same can be said for Oracle, Dell, VMware, et. al.
- bmurray7jhu 4y agoCriminal complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.498467/gov.uscourts.njd.498467.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.498...