Counterfeit Cisco Gear Showing Up In US

spazimodo writes to point out a Network World report on the growing problem of counterfeit networking equipment. The article surveys the whole grey-market phenomenon, which is by no means limited to Cisco gear — they just happen to be its biggest target. From the article: "Thirty cards turned out to be counterfeit... Despite repeated calls and e-mails to his supplier, Atec Group, the issue was not resolved... How did a registered Cisco reseller (also a platinum Network Appliance partner and gold partner to Microsoft and Symantec) acquire the counterfeit [WAN interface cards] in the first place?... Phony network equipment [has] been quietly creeping into sales and distribution channels since early 2004... Counterfeit gear has become a big problem that could put networks — and health and safety — at risk. 'Nobody wants to say they've got counterfeit gear inside their enterprises that can all of a sudden stop working. But it's all over the place, just like pirated software is everywhere,' says Sharon Mills, director of IT procurement organization Caucus."

Comments

Photography gear

[dedazo]

The 'grey market' for cameras, lenses and other accessories is also huge, especially now with the wild proliferation of digital cameras, although it used to be smaller in scale in the days of film SLRs.

Even reputable shops like Adorama will sell you 'grey' prosumer Nikon digital SLRs for example. The difference is the lack of a US-actionable warranty and funky things like manuals in Turkish and whatnot... but other than that the gear is largely the same (be careful who you buy from anyway!). These things typically go for about 10% less than the 'straight' ones.

I've bought a couple of high-end Canon lenses this way and I haven't been burned yet, but I probably won't be doing it anymore. Too much risk.

Re:Just FUD?

[superskippy]

I work for an ISP in the UK, and we've bought fake Cisco interface cards in the past (although it was before I started working there), that we're labeled as genuine.

So this stuff definitely does exist.

not quite as bad...

[User 956]

This isn't as bad as when pirates pirated an entire company: NEC. Yeah, they had fake buildings, fake manufacturing facilities, fake executives, everything.

It should be EASY to track.

[khasim]

These are physical items. It's not like software.

You buy them from a store. The store has to have them on hand or order them. Either way, since the store you're buying them from did not make them, shipment will be required.

So just keep following each shipment back until you find the company that manufactured the parts or the company that "cannot find their records".

There, problem solved.

Re:Just FUD?

[Rice-Pudding]

Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone other than cisco themselves.

Whether or not this is what happened in this particular case, I don't know. But in general, the issue is not that someone has taken the time to reverse-engineer a complete product and produce it again from the ground up. The "fake" hardware likely comes from any combination of several places:

• Chip vendors often have huge inventories of chips that failed testing, but are otherwise marginally functional. Some of these chips could be branded and sold by an unscrupulous factory (hehe, that sounds funny :-) as legitimate parts. Or more likely, they can be sold to the guy in the next point:
• Factories in 3rd-world or offshore countries (cheap labour) can and do produce legitimate hardware items for some of the big-name companies, of which Cisco is one. That is, they produce the legit hardware by day. After hours, or for a portion of the day, they can use the exact same process, exact same tooling, etc. to produce the knock-offs. These are then distributed through some other means.
• Finally, the contract manufacturers (factories in the above point) will have many products that failed QA, but a marginally functional. These also can get sold as counterfeit gear. So the reverse-engineering is not so much the issue (although I am sure there is some degree of that). But as another poster mentioned, if you have the expertise to completely reverse-engineer something and reproduce it, you should go into business yourself selling a competing product that is much cheaper:-)

Most Cisco hardware not ASIC accelerated

[anti-NAT]

You generally have to go above the 7000 series to get ASIC accelerated forwarding. As an example, the specifications of a Broadcom BCM1250 read remarkably like the specifications of a Cisco 7301, because that's what's inside one.

show ver

on the router shows the CPU model number, and

show controller <blah>

will show you the current register values, which you can then look up in the BCM1250 reference manual.

Re:Folex or illegal production?

[tkrotchko]

Years ago we purchased a Cisco Ethernet interface and paid some outrageous amount. Like... 4 figures. It was a standard PCI Ethernet card with no ID on it. Except the board had an FCC number on it. We checked, and it turned out to be a cheap Ethernet card that was readily available for about $25 anywhere. The only difference was there was no manufacturer identified.

Now, I don't know if this was a special case, but surely somebody figured out that some of these parts are generic parts and is selling them with phony Cisco papers and making a tidy profit.