Cisco Shipping Hardware To Bogus Addresses To Throw Off NSA Intercept-And-Implant Efforts

from the 1324-Middle-Finger-Extended-Blvd. dept

Cisco became an inadvertent (and very unwilling) co-star in the NSA Antics: Snowden Edition when its logo was splashed across the web by a leaked document detailing the agency's interception of outbound US networking hardware in order to insert surveillance backdoors.

It moved quickly to mitigate the damage, sending a letter to the President asking him and his administration to institute some safeguards and limitations to protect US tech companies from the NSA's backdoor plans. To date, there has been no direct response. So, Cisco has decided to handle the problem itself.

Cisco will ship boxes to vacant addresses in a bid to foil the NSA, security chief John Stewart says.

The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers…

"We ship [boxes] to an address that's has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who ultimately it is going to," Stewart says.

"When customers are truly worried ... it causes other issues to make [interception] more difficult in that [agencies] don't quite know where that router is going so its very hard to target - you'd have to target all of them. There is always going to be inherent risk."

Stewart acknowledges that Cisco's modified dead drop shipping operations aren't foolproof, but will at least force the agency to do a little more research before intercepting packages. Stewart also noted that some customers aren't taking any chances, opting to pick up their hardware from Cisco directly.

There are also variables Cisco simply can't control, like the possibility of inbound components from upline manufacturers arriving pre-compromised. But it's doing what it can to ensure that "Cisco" isn't synonymous with "spyware."

Then there's always the possibility that the government may find Cisco's new routing methods to be quasi-fraudulent and force the company to plainly state where each package is actually going. No response has been issued by the ODNI or NSA to this news, and most likely, none will be forthcoming. Any statement on Cisco's fictitious routing would tip its hand.

Cisco's plan makes a lot of assumptions about the NSA's capabilities, most of which aren't particularly sound, but this seems to be more a public display of pique than a surefire way to eliminate most of the NSA's hardware interceptions. It also sends a message to the NSA, one it's been hearing more and more of over the last couple of years: the nation's tech companies aren't your buddies and they're more than a little tired of being unwilling partners in worldwide surveillance.

Filed Under: backdoors, fake addresses, interception, nsa, shipping, surveillance
Companies: cisco