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To Avoid NSA Interception, Cisco Will Ship To Decoy Addresses
An anonymous reader writes with this news snipped from The Register: 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. The interception campaign was revealed last May. Speaking at a Cisco Live press panel in Melbourne today, Stewart says the Borg will ship to fake identities for its most sensitive customers, in the hope that the NSA's interceptions are targeted. 'We ship [boxes] to an address that has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who, ultimately, it is going to,' Stewart says.
box, pl. boxen
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Have you never read The Jargon File. It's required reading for any hacker.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Boxes is the plural of box only if you're talking about containers like cardboard or wooden boxes, etc.
If you're talking about computer gear that happens to come in a vaguely box-shaped chassis (like a computer or a network switch), the plural is boxen. See also "vaxen".
Keep up? The terminology is possibly older than you are.
If you trusted Cisco, you'd drive to a random store at a random time and buy a unit off the shelf.
However CISCO sell tech to the US government, and in turn are required to hand their code over to NSA we presume, and certainly have been deeply involved in NSA's cyber security stuff, so I think you have to consider their routers compromised.
http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/nccoe-041513.cfm
"ROCKVILLE, Md. — In recognition of the critical need to protect private-sector intellectual property and other valuable business data from a growing number of cyber threats 11 major companies have formally established partnerships with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE). U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, U.S. Cyber Command Commander/National Security Agency (NSA) Director General KEITH B ALEXANDER, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Montgomery County Chief Executive Isiah Leggett and Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Patrick Gallagher joined the new partners for a signing ceremony today at the NCCOE’s facilities in Rockville, Md."
"At the ceremony, representatives from the new partner companies – CISCO SYSTEMS Inc., Hewlett-Packard, HyTrust Inc., Intel Corp., McAfee Inc., Microsoft Federal Civilian Services, RSA, Splunk Inc., Symantec Corp., Vanguard Integrity Professionals and Venafi Inc. – pledged to contribute hardware and software components and share best practices and personnel with the center."