[Wikimedia-l] Dells are backdored

[John Vandenberg]

Putting aside the 'tax' aspect, whether or not there is a backdoor in the
shipped product is not the point of the article you linked to James.

NSA is intercepting hardware deliveries and adding backdoors while it is
enroute from supplier to customer. Buying new equipment gives NSA a new
opportunity to inject backdoors unless WMF has staff watching the entire
manufacturing and delivery process.

The latest revelations give details of only a few of NSAs capabilities.
Eliminating the now known threats, and all the other possible vectors is
not feasible.

A more sensible strategy is to put perimeters around sets of private data,
and watch your own equipment for unusual activity, with more focus on
outbound than was previously thought necessary by most organisations. The
extreme end is using trusted operating systems, tagging all data and
network interfaces & software preventing unapproved data transits.

WMF already has serious network traffic analytics and monitoring. Maybe
some more rules and alerts are needed, but everyone is reviewing how
suspicious they should be of their 'own' internal equipment now.
 On Dec 29, 2013 7:56 PM, "James Salsman" <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can we please stop paying the Microsoft and NSA taxes and start buying
> datacenter equipment which costs a lot less? Cubieboard/Cubietrucks for
> instance?
>
> Ref.:
>
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html
>
> Best regards,
> James
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