FBI investigation says that US military equipment may have counterfeit Chinese components

It seems that counterfeit parts can not only be injurious to your health and that of your machine, but can also jeopardize national security. At least that is one of the possibilities prompted by a two-year investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into counterfeit networking components which yielded 3,500 such specimens worth more than $3.5 million in the open market.

The cost of the faulty components may not be very high in monetary terms, but as far as strategic issues are concerned, the discovery of their presence in military hardware has caused several worried minds at military headquarters in the Pentagon.

The entire operation, codenamed ''Operation Cisco Raider'' after the American company whose networking components were mostly counterfeited, involved the execution of 36 search warrants and has resulted in 15 criminal cases being filed by military agencies, military contractors and electric power companies in the country. Components included pirated versions of Cisco Systems Inc routers as well as switches, interface converters and wide area network interface cards, many of which were bought by military contractors.

The federal agency is still not certain whether the counterfeit ring's actions were for profit or part of a state-sponsored intelligence effort, or in other words, a subversive effort by China. The potential threat, according to the FBI agents who gave a briefing at the Office of Management and Budget on 11th January this year, includes the remote jamming of supposedly secure computer networks and gaining access to supposedly highly secure systems.

This briefing, in the form of a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation, was leaked to the public domain through the conspiracy and strategy discussion website Abovetopsecret.com.

Cisco officials were quick to refute any dangers to US military equipment and explained illicit profit-making as the reason behind the counterfeit operation. ''We did not find any evidence of re-engineering in the manner that was described in the FBI presentation,'' said John Noh, a company spokesman. He added that the company believed the counterfeiters were interested in copying high volume products to make a quick profit. ''We know what these counterfeiters are about.''

Despite Cisco's reassurance, a number of industry executives and technologists said that the threat of secretly added circuitry intended to subvert computer and network gear is real. Moreover, this concern is nothing new. As early as the 1980s, the National Security Agency (NSA) was suspected of using such techniques to gain access to encrypted messages. There have also been speculations that ant-aircraft gun batteries guarding Syrian and Iraqi skies had been remotely switched off by the Israeli and US forces respectively when they had attacked.