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This new information puts American companies at even more risk of lost sales since given two companies, American Company and Foreign Company, the NSA is always
by malandrew 13y ago
This new information puts American companies at even more risk of lost sales since given two companies, American Company and Foreign Company, the NSA is always going to have a massive advantage in penetrating the American company to get as much information they want to produce these backdoors. Whenever they fail to remotely access the company networks containing the IP for all the equipment they want to target, they have many more options available to physically access the network of these companies, possibly going as far as having a mole working at the companies, exfiltrating the IP they need to produce the tools in the catalog or even deliberately putting in backdoors.
This is probably the most damning information I've seen of NSA activities. This is anti-American activity since it clearly harms US economic interests. This coupled with the policy that spying on foreigners is fair-game is enough reason to give any foreign government or company enough reason never to purchase equipment from US tech companies.
As an engineer in the US, this makes my blood boil. I really hope that this new information generates more interest in open-source network software and hardware.
- casca 13y agoJuniper were making good inroads into the corporate firewall market at the expense of Checkpoint. It'll be interesting to see whether this sees a move back to Checkpoint as the firewall product of choice.
- malandrew 13y agoMore info on Checkpoint? What about an open-source alternative to both?
- Spooky23 13y agoAs an Israeli company, I'm sure that they won't be making inroads in the middle eastern markets.
- midas007 13y agoAnother reason to consider pfSense (which could use a crowdfunded secaudit like TrueCrypt).
- superuser2 13y agoPlanting moles in foreign organizations is the explicit purpose and core competency of foreign intelligence agencies. It's only inside the US where that activity is (supposed to be) forbidden. You should assume that the US intelligence community is already doing this to foreign tech corporations and has been forever.
- malandrew 13y agoThat's exactly my point. It was supposed to be forbidden domestically and that added trust to US-made technologies. However, now that we've learned that US companies are completely fair game, the level of access the government has to domestic companies via moles, NSLs and other acts of espionage, we should assume that domestic companies are far more compromised than foreign companies. This assumption is not only reasonable but the responsible assumption to hold if you are a foreigner.
- Spooky23 13y agoI think that's an issue with services based businesses like SaaS/PaaS/cloud providers. You're also making an assumption that national affiliation matters in a global company. With hardware companies, I doubt there's much of a difference. Getting a mole placed in a foreign company is totally achievable, just a different set of motivators for the mole. Actually, you don't need to compromise an OEM computer or network manufacturer. Just pay off a contractor in the supply chain who manufactures key parts. Even in the case of services/cloud, I doubt it matters. If the NSA hacked the chancellor of Germany's personal phone, what makes you think that they haven't compromised German cloud providers as well?