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Cisco Systems pulled out of Russia: destroyed $23.42M worth of equipment
- RobotToaster 4y agoSo they destroyed three routers?
- wkdneidbwf 4y agohheeeyyyyoooo!
- goodpoint 4y ago"Cisco Systems decided to physically destroy spare parts, product demonstrations, equipment and even furniture"
- jokowueu 4y agoWhy not ship them or sell them over seas instead of destroying them ?
- monero-xmr 4y agoI like the idea of scorched earth when you are forced to leave because of outside circumstances (war, politics, etc.). Burn it down! But for serious, likely too risky to have the potential for anything that can fall into a sanctioned country’s hands. Just destroy it and write it off.
- Arrath 4y agoThat assumes that Russian officials would let the items leave.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoBingo! AFAIK Russia has banned the sale or expatriation of western assets out of Russia.
- bena 4y agoBecause you're not getting that hardware out of Russia through normal channels. In the best of times, in the best of places, you'd be able to do that. Decommission the hardware in use, pack it all up, ship it wherever. It is not the best of times in Russia and it was never the best of places. In the best of times while operating in an adversarial market (to put it diplomatically), you have to know you're doing this well in advance and slowly phase out the equipment. Some of it is likely physically installed in the locations. And you have to do this while essentially receiving no new equipment. Which you could do by just faking shipments and manifests. But you're effectively smuggling at this point. Now, with everything going on. You have to worry about Russia just sort of claiming your hardware/business/people and daring you to come get it. You get your people out and torch everything you can on your way out.
- moate 4y agoA few things. 1- That involves added costs that you may or may not recoup (read sibling comment about Russia "not allowing it" which doesn't seem out of hand). So if you don't want it in the current State's hands, and you can't reliably export them, destruction might be the right choice. 2- Part of the goal may be the headline. Either good press for Cisco or bad press for Russia, but visibility can be a goal as well.
- Jerry2 4y agoThey probably had special NSA implants inside of them and didn't want it getting out. [1] [1] 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...
- axus 4y agoIt'd be really impressive if the NSA could intercept shipment a router manufactured in Russia or China, and then re-insert the shipment into the supply chain. Now I know why Cisco gear always takes forever to ship.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago> manufactured in Russia or China > Servers, routers get “beacons” implanted at secret locations by NSA’s TAO team. (subtitle from the article in GP; emphasis mine) Didn't make sense at first but now it does. Yeah, that would be impressive.
- crest 4y agoTons of networking components contain microprocessors, microcontrollers and programmable logic with excess capacity for their role and could hide implants in software, firmware or even bitstreams without changing a single part of the hardware e.g. leaking encryption keys as jitter observable to a passive attacker, just waiting for backdoor command to e.g. drop or massively delay 90% of all traffic or even fry the hardware by overvolting or intentionally violating bus arbitration rules having multiple push-pull drivers active at the same time on a bus. You're only limited by the available time, physical access, hardware and the creativity of your paranoia. Should such implants exist it could be installed in a few minutes either through the whatever update process is supposed to patch the involved components or through, exposed test pads or even clipping suitable packages on the boards e.g. a serial flash chip. It's a scary paranoid idea. There is no need to add imaginary Chinese spy chips to Supermicro mainboards the common AST2x000 BMC chips are already ideal spy chips by design and given the observed quality of the firmware e.g. there used to be an undocumented command available via the SSH management shell to drop into a root shell on the BMC and you could just download the plaintext password file required to log in via HTTP. While disclosing the password file via SSH is bad you can't even blame Supermicro for storing the plaintext passwords in the first place since IPMI BMCs have to store the plaintext passwords because they're required for the terrible challenge-response handshake mandated in the protocol which doesn't allow storing only a precomputed salted hash over the password. How many companies dispose of old servers without wiping the BMC passwords? How many of them reuse a single password over large parts of the server fleet? Some days I find it hard to attribute this to incompetence instead of malice. Now where have I left my tinfoil hat? sigh
- triggerwarn 4y ago[dead]
- ss48 4y ago> "By the end of 2022, Cisco Systems had reduced its workforce by a factor of 12 to five employees." I think something got lost in translation here.
- janpieterz 4y agoI read it as they originally had 60 employees. Odd wording.
- gremlinsinc 4y agoI think they maybe mean 12x5, so from 60 to 5 but don't quote me on that.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI guess this is what happens when people take math word problems as a style guide.
- g42gregory 4y agoThis is very bizarre. All sanctions have carve-outs for exactly the Cisco products (so that customers can always safely get online!) Now it will all get replaced with Huawei products. How is this better?
- 7thaccount 4y agoFair point. I don't think we've thought through all the implications of this.
- mtnGoat 4y agoUntil they are replaced they will not get updates, leaving them open for possible intrusions. Let them have Chinese equipment, starving them of western technology to reverse engineer, steal or sell to competitors isn’t a bad thing either.
- monocasa 4y agoI doubt they have a problem putting their hands on enough IP to reverse engineer, despite the sanctions.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoProbably, but will they be able to reverse engineer and produce successfully? Everything I've read about Russia indicates that, while they have plenty of smart engineers*, the business culture and civic society are so messed up that they have lots of problems actually making things in practice. Too much corruption and people trying to take advantage of each other. * Well, maybe less now, since so many IT workers fled
- monocasa 4y agoBut any problems there aren't an issue of sourcing units to reverse engineer. Practically, the sanctions won't function that way.
- donmcronald 4y ago> Three months later, the company refused to renew its licenses. Does the equipment stop working? I don’t understand how any country in the world is using equipment that can be turned off by the manufacturer. Infrastructure, communications, farming, etc. should all be run with non-revocable licenses. Make it the law.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- atemerev 4y agoNot your production -- not your coins^W hardware. In peacetime, it doesn't matter too much, because nearly nothing can outweigh the reputation loss if there is a case of remote equipment sabotage. In wartime, however, all bets are off. Not that I have any pity towards Russia, but, say, China can also do this in the case of war.
- jstarfish 4y agoYeah, we know. The US proactively banned Huawei gear to prevent the same rug from being pulled out from under us. Europe has Juniper. Same with some foreign governments moving to private-label Linux variants to reduce reliance on [US-produced] Windows. Next is TikTok, to eliminate foreign software with large domestic deployment. Unless we backdoor Android/iOS, the US doesn't have too many more strings to pull.
- goodpoint 4y ago"Cisco Systems decided to physically destroy spare parts, product demonstrations, equipment and even furniture"
- The_Colonel 4y agoI don't think that answers the question. OP asked (probably) about hardware deployed on client premises, but running proprietary software requiring license (or perhaps subscription as the "renew" suggests?).
- drivingmenuts 4y agoThe site is ostensibly in Ukraine. This may be propaganda. It might be disinformation. Just FYI.
- jokowueu 4y agoThe source is from a Russian source https://tass.ru/ekonomika/17451425 https://tass.ru/ekonomika/17451425
- datadeft 4y agoSo Russian sources are trustworthy now?
- Nextgrid 4y agoIf they paint Russia in a bad light or admit negative impact, they're at least slightly more trustworthy than the other way around?
- jstarfish 4y agoIf you start believing only bad news about an adversary, they'll publish it themselves in order to mislead you and downplay their capabilities. Just assume everything coming from them is propaganda and draw your own conclusions from sources that can't be puppeted by an enemy regime playing hardball psyops with social media for the last two decades.
- jokowueu 4y agoI guess we will wait until Cisco says the same thing ..... But Cisco is an American company . America is in NATO .I'm American too this website is also based on the US . We are all paid shills and you are the only real person here
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stickfigure 4y agoRelated: What's the current status of iOS and Android devices in Russia? Are they still getting updates?
- ussrlongbow 4y agoThey do
- flangola7 4y agoHow? They're sanctioned
- selivanovp 4y agoPayments to and from Russia are sanctioned, some banking/government services apps removed from the stores, but everything else works as before. And since Android allows 3rd party app stores, Russia has now its own app store where you can get everything what was banned due to sanctions.
- iavael 3y agoAlso as a software company you anyway don't want people massively using old versions of your product with publicly known security flaws. "New large YourProduct botnet noticed by security researchers" is never a good publicity in media even if botnet consists of sanctioned users' devices.
- cameron_b 4y agoCuirously, Putin has been photographed with Video Conferencing gear similar to what Cisco sells, but from competitor Polycom ( now known as Poly, but made when it was Polycom ) I can't imagine this is anything more than a good opportunity to cut bait and get a good pres release on the write-off
- thefz 4y agoWhat a waste of rare earths, minerals and metals.
- perryizgr8 4y agoKnowing Cisco's prices, $23 M must be only like 10-20 network appliances lol.