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Somehow I doubt Al Qaeda is using Juniper, but our allies (read: economic adversaries) are. I hope the companies listed -- Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western D
by ihsw 13y ago
Somehow I doubt Al Qaeda is using Juniper, but our allies (read: economic adversaries) are.
I hope the companies listed -- Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, et al -- are happy with themselves. The government's mantra has historically been similar to that of Microsoft's: embrace, extend, extinguish. The US Government is no different and they'll happily throw every company under the bus for the smallest advantage over their adversaries.
America's rivalry with China is continually climbing higher and higher, and we're getting dragged along whether we like it or not. The unshakable intertwining of private and public industries, the scorched-earth economic policies where private industry is consumed for the benefit of the public, the unlimited spying powers -- all to stay ahead of China.
The real kicker is that this kind of spying power compounds on itself -- as soon as we get Juniper gear exploited then we can move onto infiltrating Seagate's intranets, and then we can use Seagate exploits to more easily dig into hard-drives accessible by us/in custody by us. We may never be able to make a distinction between which tech companies have been exploited and which are wilfully/maliciously passing vulnerability information to the US Government.
- EFruit 13y ago>I hope the companies listed -- Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, et al -- are happy with themselves. I'm not going to say that these companies are fantastic. I'm just not, but I will say that perhaps this isn't really their fault. Let's say that BIND has a critical vulnerability that allows people to snoop on the requests made. Does that make the ISC guilty of giving the NSA access to every BIND DNS server on the internet? No, it doesn't.
- joe_the_user 13y agoThe question is whether these exploits are accidents or the result of companies giving in to pressure from the NSA. If the Snowden revelations are to be believed, at least some of the exploits were the result of giving into NSA pressure. But the problem with this is that it breaks the chain of trust that a company has with it's customers. Once you know the NSA is applying pressure secretly to force some vulnerabilities to remain open, how can you know they aren't doing that with any given vulnerability.
- Spooky23 13y agoMy guess is that it's all of the above. You're talking about a massive, compartmentalized organization. I'm sure that different groups approach their data acquisition activities with multiple channels, if for no reason other than to prevent other NSA people from knowing about to what they are doing.
- googlemployee1 13y agoYou're REALLY going to try and get that jib about Microsoft in there? Christ, HN really has turned to shit. Get a clue, EVERY company does this. Stop fan-boying and learn to think for yourself.
- rdl 13y agoAQ doesn't buy directly from Juniper (I think), but they definitely use networks which are Juniper powered (at least based on the Juniper sales volumes I saw going to Middle Eastern carriers). The point would be to attack a carrier in a foreign country, then use that to attack their users (who may be AQ).
- fortepianissimo 13y agoWhere did "IBM" appear in the story? I can't find it.