Another Reason to buy Sonicwall?
Posted on May 19, 2008 at 12:00 am by jasonlee
The FBI is looking into fraudulent the selling of Cisco gear from China via Ebay. The phony gear is reported to include hidden backdoors leaving huge security holes in the networks in which they are deployed.
Seriously… I have to wonder, wouldn’t it be a resume generating event for even thinking "Hey I just found a great deal on EBAY on a "NEW" Cisco router for $1,100 less than list price".
I love the Problems and Examples slide that the FBI included in the presentation: 
ZDnet has all the slides from the FBI giving specifics of the operation.
Matthew Irvine
05.19.2008 7:56 am
I like the fact that “In 2004, a government agency” bought the thing. I wonder how that went down. I don’t see our government as being really thrifty, so how’d they end up buying fake routers from eBay. Hmmmmm.
Ian Beyer
05.20.2008 6:50 am
I think this also highlights some of the dangers in having critical network infrastructure equipment built in a “hostile” country.
Can you imagine if we were buying Soviet-built IBM mainframes during the Cold War?
I can only hope that our government has frequent and thorough security audits of all their equipment, especially the network gear that’s handling sensitive traffic. And I REALLY hope none of this gear ended up on SIPRNET.