Chinese whispers louder in security word war
Shot at Cisco is latest salvo in global infosec war, notes Chris Gonsalves
In the current global information security battle, the rhetoric pendulum this week has swung decidedly in China's favour as Beijing unleashes a torrent of accusations and warnings at US tech companies.
The latest salvo came Tuesday when Chinese state media criticised Cisco Systems, saying the networking giant helped the US government spy on China and others around the world. IBM and Microsoft have also taken their lumps this week.
In an editorial originally published on the website of the state-run China Youth Daily newspaper, Chinese authorities said Cisco "carries on intimately with the US government and military, exploiting its market advantage in the Chinese information networks, playing a disgraceful role and becoming an important weapon in the US['s] exploiting [of] its power over the internet."
The admonishment of Cisco comes just a week after the unprecedented indictment by the US of five Chinese military personnel accused of hacking into the networks of US-based companies to steal intellectual property and trade secrets.
Cisco, which gets about 15 per cent of its revenue from China, promptly issued a statement denying it was complicit in any of the surveillance activities now roiling the US intelligence community in the wake of the leakage of secret NSA documents by former employee Edward Snowden.
"Cisco does not work with any government to weaken our products for exploitation," Cisco spokesman John Earnhardt said. "Additionally, Cisco does not monitor communications of private citizens or government organisations in China or anywhere in the world."
The US indictments of foreign military officers who are unlikely to ever be apprehended or charged has nonetheless set off a firestorm of criticism and economic retribution from the Chinese, angered by what they see as hypocrisy on the part of the Americans who are dealing with their own spying scandal.
In the past week, Beijing has issued orders forbidding any government organisations - which in China tangentially includes many business entities - from upgrading to Windows 8, saying the new operating system poses a nation security threat.
Behind the scenes, China has been pressing Microsoft to continue to support Windows XP, the outdated OS that still runs on about 50 per cent of the PCs in China.
Just yesterday, news wire Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter, claimed that the Chinese were scouring IBM servers in banks and other financial institutions to determine if Big Blue's equipment posed a threat to the nation's financial stability and security.
In a statement, IBM staff said they hadn't heard about any such action.
"IBM is not aware of any Chinese government policy recommending against the use of IBM servers within the country's banking industry," the statement read. "IBM is a trusted partner in China and has been for more than 30 years."
The global dust-up mirrors what Chinese technology vendors like Huawei and ZTE have endured over the past two years in the US.
Suspicions of Huawei's trustworthiness were fanned in October 2012 when the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report citing Huawei and ZTE for secretive business practices, ties to China's communist government and claims that its equipment could be used to spy on US companies and government agencies and pose a threat to national security.
"If I were an American company today and looking at Huawei, I would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers' privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America," committee chair and former FBI agent Representative for Michigan Mike Rogers said at the time.
From the business-minded folks in the debate, the effort seemed to be moving toward resolution and a reduction in harsh rhetoric.
"Some of the noise in the system has slowed us down, that's the reality," Jane Li, COO for Huawei Enterprise USA told Channelnomics recently. "It is frustrating. It has taken unreasonable time for the noise to go away, but I believe it will. I still firmly believe in America."
But Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting, a Beijing-based information technology consulting firm, said he expects the war of words on the information security front to get worse before it gets better.
"I think it is certainly difficult for policy makers and other authorities here to simply sit back and be subject to these sorts of allegations and say nothing," Natkin told Financial Review.
"I do think we'll see some more escalation, and hopefully, it will not be permanent. Hopefully, it will not last too long. Right now it's hard to imagine it all clearing away."
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