Individual Gets 6 Years in Prison for Selling Fake Cisco Gear on Amazon, eBay (pcmag.com) 73
A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems. From a report: On Wednesday, 40-year-old Onur Aksoy was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for raking in at least $100 million from the counterfeit sales. Aksoy committed the fraud from at least 2013 to 2022 -- the year he was arrested -- by buying the fake Cisco equipment from suppliers in China. The counterfeits were then resold as legitimate Cisco products for an estimated retail value of over $1 billion.
"Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems, including platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement.
"Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems, including platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement.
I have questions... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I have questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really counterfeit. Huawei tried to sell us switches about a decade ago that were according to their sales engineer "we don't have to retrain our network engineers because they had an identical interface to Cisco IOS". Basically if you SSH'ed in you could get a Cisco interface or an HP interface, whatever you wanted it to be, they had an API overlay.
In the end Cisco switches are just Juniper, which are just HP or SuperMicro or Dell switches, they all use the same backplanes from Broadcom or a few (2 or 3) other manufacturers, they just re-badge them and flash the x86 server in it with different operating systems.
Re:I have questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end Cisco switches are just Juniper, which are just HP or SuperMicro or Dell switches, they all use the same backplanes from Broadcom or a few (2 or 3) other manufacturers, they just re-badge them and flash the x86 server in it with different operating systems.
Ultimately this re-branding tends to highlight the fact that the IT professional managing a data enterprise does not pay a premium for the hardware. Anyone can make a switch.
What you pay a true premium for is when Shit Happens at 2AM and your network goes haywire, forcing the IT professional to rely on the trained technical support they paid a lot for and expect to get at 2AM in order to save their ass.
All the more reason it blows me away that a billion dollars worth of fake Cisco hardware went undetected for a decade in the field. Apparently there was never one issue that triggered a call to support to raise flags about fake product long ago? Seems quite incredible.
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forcing the IT professional to rely on the trained technical support they paid a lot for and expect to get at 2AM
If that is your plan, then you are kind of screwed. That might be what people think they are paying for, but if you call up Support after hours you'll be lucky if you get an engineer assigned to that case by lunch the next day.
The 2AM "trained" technical support from those vendors is basically useless unless what you require is a hardware RMA; what you need is a few CCIEs around or an on-call
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forcing the IT professional to rely on the trained technical support they paid a lot for and expect to get at 2AM
If that is your plan, then you are kind of screwed. That might be what people think they are paying for, but if you call up Support after hours you'll be lucky if you get an engineer assigned to that case by lunch the next day.
The 2AM "trained" technical support from those vendors is basically useless unless what you require is a hardware RMA; what you need is a few CCIEs around or an on-call consultant, even then it's a next-business day response by the end of the next business day unless your company paid a LOT extra for the highest end support contract.
Which Cisco offers to customers. Customers who already paid a LOT for the hardware.
Not doing the proper analysis to determine what an hours worth of downtime ultimately costs at 2AM to justify a LOT of support, is what will screw you. Shit Happens. Managers understand and mostly accept that. What they don’t accept, is being unprepared for it.
This is why SLAs are important between IT and management. Support expectations should be funded, not assumed.
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Unless you have a 7x24 N hr response add-on support contract they aren't going to answer it at 2am. And you only need that contract if you have a complicated network with a lot of different networks/gateways and routing defined.
It is possible that Cisco sold one or more of those contracts without realizing that at least some of the environment was fake Cisco gear. And the support contract is its own product making its own money separately from the hardware, so they may still help simply because they a
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Unless you have a 7x24 N hr response add-on support contract they aren't going to answer it at 2am.
Well if you have that, then they take your call, and there are some things they can help with, and some things not so much. It doesn't guarantee the vendor has dev resources committed 24x7 to isolate a software fault.
I mean... for 2AM emergencies, you would be better off 99% of the time by having employees of your own company who would be able to self-support the network, unless what you require is a repl
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No, they called Cisco and they got support. These switches are coming from the same factory, have the serial numbers and conventions of Cisco etc. that's what makes them counterfeits. It's just Huawei making them, selling them and letting Cisco provide support for them. Only after a few of them ended up on a bench at Cisco for not working according to spec is when they realize, hey, we didn't actually build that one. Most of them if they stop working completely just go on the garbage pile as Cisco sends a r
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No, they called Cisco and they got support. These switches are coming from the same factory, have the serial numbers and conventions of Cisco etc. that's what makes them counterfeits. It's just Huawei making them, selling them and letting Cisco provide support for them.
Uh, Cisco is letting them?
If Chevrolet is going to let a chop shop put together and sell “Chevrolets” at black market prices, all while allowing customers to bring them in for warranty and recall work at authentic dealerships while NO one says a word, then I just have one question; why in the HELL did the chop shop guy get arrested?
Either everyone is in the wrong here, or no one is.
Re: I have questions... (Score:1)
It would be similar to bringing in a Chevy with a proper VIN number but that is actually not sold by Chevy but a reject. Only when you look under the hood will you find out the details, and then you still need to be a mechanic.
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Do you really expect a support contract with Cisco if you one-click buy from a third party seller on Amazon or Ebay?
No.
Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in....platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft
I more expect those supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft, to not be one-click buying from fucking Amazon or eBay.
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. Apparently there was never one issue that triggered a call to support to raise flags about fake product long ago? Seems quite incredible.
Why do you think you would be aware of this call? Fake Cisco routers have been an issue for a while: https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]
Getting fake routers to the military is a national security issue where they might not be updating you on every step of the investigation.
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Cisco copied their command interface from the TOPS-20 operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
well older models may only be on ebay and if you n (Score:2)
well older models may only be on ebay and if you need model X to replace model X that failed?
And it maybe that the local vendor buys spare parts from ebay.
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Yeah.. I'm curious what the situation is they're applying the word counterfeit to here.
I know the vendors have a very dim view as to product resales, and it may even be that they consider a Resold genuine unit to be counterfeit if the reseller did not erase all the software from the unit before selling.
I also heard of "Counterfeit SFPs" which are absurd -- the SFP is a standardized module. They are generally all identical from the same suppliers, and Each vendor writes their ID on the chip, and th
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Yeah.. I'm curious what the situation is they're applying the word counterfeit to here.
If it was branded as Cisco, even if it was off the same product line and just happened to be an "overrun," unless Cisco sold it it's counterfeit. It may be identical to a genuine Cisco part but it never passed though their sales pipeline. Even "Genuine" can be problematic in that manufacturers may have different quality specs or tolerances depending where it will be sold. They need to meet a price point, so while both parts in two separate areas are "Genuine" in that the part is sold by the manufacturer,
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It probably ends up in government server rooms because some Internet Service Provider bought the needed equipment in a Pinch to meet an immediate need, and the official versions have like a 6 Month lead time to order a router, during CovID.
It's generally real working hardware made by the same factory line that produces and assembles the official version.
Meaning it is likely physically identical to the "real" version; Just not Legal.
The "counterfeit" bit is that it's Not created with Cisco's authorization
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To answer the second part, the government goes to the cheapest bidder. The cheapest bidder makes money by buying the cheapest gear available. Counterfeit gear undercuts the original because they just have to copy the original PCBs and then get the software running on that without having to do almost any of the development work.
There will be enough separation between the people who made the decisions about methods of buying that make the contract impossibly cheap and the actual fraud that nobody responsible
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To answer the second part, the government goes to the cheapest bidder
It's not that simple. To sell to the government you have to get GSA approved. It's not a trivial process. I'm guessing someone sidestepped the GSA acquisitions requirements.
Re: I have questions... (Score:2)
To sell to the government you have to get GSA approved.
Unless the government has an urgent need. Then they just whip out their credit card and buy from Best Buy or eBay*.
*It usually involves a middleman to do the reselling. To cover up the actual source, provide plausible deniability for the administration doing the purchasing, and make those resellers a bundle of cash (some of which is applied to the requisite campaign funds to keep the whole process running).
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its not about hiding the fact NSA bought a router,
Right. It's about hiding who they bought it from.
its about supply chain security. Supermicro hack was 5 years ago
The Supermicro hack was amateurish. You solder a stand-alone chip to a motherboard and hope nobody will ask what its for? When you can encapsulate the same die in an existing chip? Or even include the HDL for your sneaky chip in an existing PLD that people expect to see?
Most of the GSA regulations are about getting vendors to sign on to a bunch of crazy DEI promises. And most of the stuff bought by the gov't isn't susceptible to hacks. You want the good coff
Re:I have questions... (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
To create the counterfeits, the Chinese suppliers often took older, lower-model products, some of which were previously discarded, and modified them to appear new, while loading pirated Cisco software on the hardware.
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How do you a) counterfeit hardware, b) how does ebay used gear ends up in government server rooms?
Answer to A: Probably someone (a company somewhere) chassis that looked like Cisco chassis (or painted them to look like them), added hardware that operated as such, and then slapped a Cisco label or something. The product might indeed work as intended, but making it look like someone's brand makes it counterfeit.
And this is a problem, not only on stealing a trademark, but it also defraud users. When costumers buy a piece of hardware, there's an expectation that they will get regular updates (in particul
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"there's an expectation that they will get regular updates (in particular security patches.)"
You must have a Cisco SmartNet licensing agreement & the serial numbers have to be registered with them.
Simply owning the hardware hasn't been enough in at least 20 years to even be able to download Cisco IOS updates for routers & switches.
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Similar stories were published in 2020 based on an F-Secure paper in the same year. Maybe they're related.
https://labs.withsecure.com/co... [withsecure.com]
procurement? (Score:3)
They just bought stuff from ebay without checking on it?
Re:procurement? (Score:5, Interesting)
They (likely) bought it from a company that claimed to have checked it but that actually bought it with an origin certificate from a company that bought it from Ebay. There have been fake components for aircraft delivered via fully verified aeronautics supply chains. These things are very difficult because it's very likely real systems are very much mixed up with the fake so they can be easily swapped around.
Re: procurement? (Score:2)
shoddy (Score:2)
A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems.
OK, but what about the authentically shoddy Cisco equipment?
fake Cisco equipment from suppliers in China. (Score:2)
Well under china IP laws cisco can't really do jack shit.
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Well under china IP laws cisco can't really do jack shit.
Obscene Price is the title of Chapter 2 in the book of Jack Schitt does Cisco
I take it you haven’t read that far yet.
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What a coincidence.
Neither can most of their equipment.
Re: fake Cisco equipment from suppliers in China. (Score:2)
Can you quote those laws, or suggest how they're lacking?
Defining “shoddy”. (Score:2)
A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems.
OK, but what about the authentically shoddy Cisco equipment?
After a billion dollars in sales, I’d more be questioning Ciscos shoddy authentication practices. You’re telling me EVERY customer he sold to was some kind of brand-spanking-new-still-got-the-plastic-on-it premium-grade moron who never owned or heard of Cisco, bought and registered expensive hardware well-known in industry to require hardware and/or software support in order to properly maintain, and BOTH the customer and Cisco had NO idea the hardware was fake?!?
There are believable stories, a
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Chances are it wasn't shoddy, it was likely identical equipment from the same factory just without the huge cisco markup.
The same thing happens with "counterfeit" fashion. These good are made in third world countries at a low cost and then the brand add a huge markup. But those same third world factories can continue making the same goods and sell them to anyone, likely at a higher wholesale cost but a lower final retail cost because the middle man distributor takes a much smaller cut.
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It may also have had shitty Chinese spyware instead of patriotic American spyware.
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Chances are it wasn't shoddy, it was likely identical equipment from the same factory just without the huge cisco markup. The same thing happens with "counterfeit" fashion.
A fancy dress shirt does not get serialized and registered with the seamstress in order for me to ensure it buttons up properly after every event. If it did, I would probably know I bought a knock-off by the time the new Spring fashion lines dropped.
Cisco product authentication, has proven to be an absolute criminal joke.
Re: Defining “shoddy”. (Score:2)
After changing their licensing model, and as the result of having an online product authorization type for the masses and another offline authorization type for the government, guess who ends up with the more counterfeited products?
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Not a billion dollars of sales, actually. The amount of gear sold would cost a billion at MSRP.
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Not sure about Cisco, but in the hardware Internet appliance sector, a lot of companies buy SuperMicro hardware, slap a custom front bezel on it (if even that), mark up the price several orders of magnitude, and call it done. That fancy disk array is likely just using Linux md-raid with a Linux iSCSI/FC initiator, or even just plain old ZFS, perhaps with some secret sauce thrown in like a DRAM card with battery backup for a cache. The fancy disk array with multiple hosts might wind upo being a machine run
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A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems.
OK, but what about the authentically shoddy Cisco equipment?
Don't forget to sign up for the expensive service contract. Nice business you have, it'd be a shame if your network went down unexpectedly.
Clickbait headline buries the lede. (Score:2)
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Really, the US government was trying to keep quiet about spying from Cisco equipment.
But maybe the NSA could have told them [infoworld.com] the hardware was counterfeit.
A Billion In Sales? That Is A Lot Of Idiots (Score:2)
In the purchasing department. How can this much fake hardware get sold unless the whole chain is jacked.
And for every person that gets caught, 3 get away.
I feel so much safer now.
I wouldn't want the legit Cisco hardware either though. A simple CVE search should give all the reasons one would need to not buy Cisco.
Re:A Billion In Sales? That Is A Lot Of Idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like this was Cisco hardware running Cisco's OS. The only difference was that it was shipped from the factory that manufactured Cisco kit to a reseller to a customer. Cisco themselves were cut out of the loop.
That's not the common definition of counterfeit.
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Nope. From TFA:
"To create the counterfeits, the Chinese suppliers often took older, lower-model products, some of which were previously discarded, and modified them to appear new, while loading pirated Cisco software on the hardware."
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Blatant racism aside: I thought that Miami was all the rage [wired.com] among tech bros [qz.com] and crypto [miamiherald.com] boosters [politico.com] that are fed up with California.
Weird (Score:2)
Actual sub-par stuff, not what I was expecting. For just a bit more you can get a Chinese factory to do an unauthorized, unlicensed run of the legitimate stuff after the regular shift and it's much, much harder to get caught.
The only reason it was discovered (Score:5, Insightful)
Was when the US Government tried to sneak in through the backdoor they install into Cisco gear only to find out it didn't work :P
The only difference between real Cisco gear and counterfit ones are whose backdoor is installed by default.
China's or the US :D
Is there a way to identify the bad ones? (Score:2)
Externally or put serial into cisco web site or show version results or ???
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What bullshit.
"Illegals raping our women" - i bet you picked that one up from truth social, no?
Uh what? (Score:2)
How does stuff bought on eBay or procured through middle-men end up in our military systems? That's not a national security concern? If we're pay $1,000 for a pencil at least get it direct from the manufacturer.
Action was needed urgently because you (Score:4, Funny)
So amazon and ebay are unindicted.... (Score:2)
We just need one prosecutor to stand up and do the right thing. The American people need RICO cases brought against Bezos (amazon) and The PayPal Mafia (ebay).
Without this action, we cannot have a free and open internet.
Not Counterfeit, Just Crap (Score:2)
"Counterfeit" is not best word choice. It appears to be all real Cisco equipment and software. They were not producing the equipment from scratch or simply rebadging non Cisco equipment. The most problematic thing is it's unsupported and may not function properly, and consequently didn't.
From TFA:
"To create the counterfeits, the Chinese suppliers often took older, lower-model products, some of which were previously discarded, and modified them to appear new, while loading pirated Cisco software on the ha
"Cisco not worth the money..." (Score:2)
Or "monopolies are bad, and extract more than they're worth" and "most customers can't tell a real Cisco from a fake".
yea but how much time (Score:2)
Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems, including platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement.,
how much time for the assholes that bought "fell off the truck" shoddy counterfeit garbage off of amazon and then stuck it in "sensitive" area's?