back to article China mulls probe into IBM, Oracle, EMC after NSA hack claims - report

China is reportedly preparing to look into NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's claims that US spooks hacked into IBM, Oracle and EMC products sold to the Asian nation's universities. The three American corporations could face a probe by Chinese police and government officials on the subject of “security issues”. The …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If it was made by a U.S. company I would have doubts. Switches, firewalls, routers and the rest now have huge question marks over them.

    PRISM is what we know. There is lots out there we still don't.

    1. Billl

      re:

      So, you'll buy your switches, routers and the rest from? Like it or not, but the enterprise runs on US tech.

  2. codejunky Silver badge

    Deja vu

    However I seem to remember it was the US suspecting china of hacking and compromised IT equipment.

    1. Roo

      Re: Deja vu

      Projecting your own failings on others seems to be routinely used to deflect scrutiny. It was not a surprise to discover that the most vocal critics of China's electronic espionage were in fact the same folks running one of the most comprehensive spying operations on civilians that the world has ever seen.

      There is a silver lining. The elected figureheads use pre-school tricks to cover their intent, so us proles still have a good chance of deducing what they are actually up to. You can always fall back to the traditional method of working out if a politician is lying or not - just watch to see the lips are moving. :)

      1. Robert Helpmann??
        Childcatcher

        Re: Deja vu

        Projecting your own failings on others seems to be routinely used to deflect scrutiny.

        I was going to say, "Takes on to know one," but that works too.

        NSA Customer Service Motto: You Speak, We Listen.

      2. Captain DaFt

        Re: Deja vu

        " You can always fall back to the traditional method of working out if a politician is lying or not - just watch to see the lips are moving. :) "

        Nice sentiment, but it needs updating:

        "How to tell if politicians are lying, their lips are moving, and/or they're using a keyboard or touch screen."

  3. K

    Episode 2 - China strikes back..

    In a country far far far away..

    Though PRISM might be given as the public motive, I suspect this has far more to do with the US and other Western nations banning of Huawei kit.

  4. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Roll your own

    It sounds like a great day to start installing open source firewalls and NAS boxes. It's my guess that there's a lot more of these sort of revelations in the pipe and this is just one reason that I've not used any commercial firewall boxes for a while - there's simply no way to know whether they will be hacked by some zero day flaw or bypassed by some governments backdoor.

    While it's a pain in the butt to do - it's also time everyone started taking a long hard look at egress filtering - these "permit all out" rules have to go.

  5. Mephistro

    Whatever goes around comes around

    'Nuff said.

  6. Knochen Brittle
    Coat

    "foxes smell their own stink first"

    ... a wise old man told me this.

  7. Denarius
    Meh

    history, open source secure ?

    Ken Thompsons " Reflections on Trusting Trust" are worth a read. Is the device hardware, firmware, linker, compiler and build OS not compromised etc ? How would one know ? The debugger could be in on it. Oh for a tin hat and 8 bit smoke signals :-) No wonder the Chinese are building their own CPUs.

  8. JCitizen

    I've protested this program everysince 911 in the US

    And I still stand my ground. We didn't need this unnecessary intrusion in the 1st place. It was only a lack of communication in our system that blocked a tip off to the hijackers. For once - I tip my hat to the PRC for giving us hell, and we deserve it! - But only because we should aspire to a higher standard - it is a little self serving for the PRC to complain, when it is well known in certain circles that they've been burning firmware back doors in chips shipping world wide for some time now.

    However - I still support their criticisms, because - as I said - we should aspire to a higher standard. Detractors will complain we may take some terrorist hits! BOO! HOO! We are supposed to be the "Land of the Brave" - did the UK cry and moan, when the blitz hit London? NOOOOOo! We have become a nation of cry-babies in the US! I'm not proud of it, but I will call it out!

  9. Billl

    "Oh, we changed our mind..."

    China has stated they will not be investigating US companies... at least publicly.

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