In one of the least thought out and dumbest moves made by our government in recent weeks… Assistant Secretary of State Richard Griffin said the department would alter its procurement process to ebsure no Lenovo PC’s are allowed inside secured U.S. networks.
This is dumb for a number of reasons.
1. Any software backdoor and ‘phone home’ keylogger would be wiped out when the machine is re-imaged. If they don’t re-image machines that come from hardware vendors than the brand is the least of our worries.
2. Any hardware spying mechanism that would remain after an imaging would still need a way to ‘phone home’ to China for them to obtain the data. Any ‘secured U.S. network’ should have egress firewalling. So not only would ‘phone home’ attempts be blocked, but also logged and provide REAL evidence that we should be concerned.
I believe this just boils down to yet another case of someone being uninformed and uneducated making big decisions that they are not qualified to do. Either that or its a more sinister attempt to curve the amount of Chinese goods purchased by the U.S. Either case doesn’t win our government any more brownie points.
