Beijing Tells Chinese Firms To Stop Using US and Israeli Cybersecurity Software (yahoo.com) 26
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese authorities have told domestic companies to stop using cybersecurity software made by roughly a dozen firms from the U.S. and Israel due to national security concerns, two people briefed on the matter said.
As trade and diplomatic tensions flare between China and the U.S. and both sides vie for tech supremacy, Beijing has been keen to replace Western-made technology with domestic alternatives. The U.S. companies whose cybersecurity software has been banned include Broadcom-owned VMware, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet, while the Israeli companies include Check Point Software Technologies, the sources said.
As trade and diplomatic tensions flare between China and the U.S. and both sides vie for tech supremacy, Beijing has been keen to replace Western-made technology with domestic alternatives. The U.S. companies whose cybersecurity software has been banned include Broadcom-owned VMware, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet, while the Israeli companies include Check Point Software Technologies, the sources said.
Banned VMware (Score:3)
Seems perfectly sensible (Score:3)
They have no reason to trust anybody, just like the US and Israel have no reason to trust Chinese software.
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Corruption.
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Fundamentalist Christian voting bloc. Gotta go to Jerusalem and be seen kissing that Roman fort wall.
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I'm kinda surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
I would have thought that China had already mandated home-grown solutions for cybersecurity a long time ago.
The fact that they suddenly feel compelled to do it now, in a wholesale fashion and at an accelerated pace, is yet another indication of how badly the US has shat the bed when it comes to its reputation for stability and reliability
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They had a similar mandate for government systems. This is now general advice.
They tend not to jump on bandwagons or issue random executive orders based on FUD.
Suggestion (Score:4, Funny)
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And in actual reality, while both the US and Israel have gotten caught and are clearly doing error-seeding to create vulnerabilities (see Cisco, for example), the Chinese are either not doing it or are decades ahead of everybody else. Somehow I doubt it is the latter.
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Well, Beijing aka the CCP wouldn't want its own firms to stop using software that Beijing can use to monitor all internal traffic, would it?
Any Western country, including Israel, would have to be pretty stupid to use Chinese software
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Think about what you wrote there, if Beijing is using such software to monitor internal traffic, so can other bad actors - which in this case includes the US. They will not have any problems with this in a lot of cases, but have no interest in company secrets being relayed offshore.
Duh (Score:3)
They probably tried to renew a VMWare license and went scorched earth.
The same is good advice for everybody else (Score:3)
Some groups of people are just not trustworthy.
Shhh! Don't Spoil It! : P (Score:1)
Absolutely. (Score:2)
The US agencies desperately want to put backdoors in everything to surveil their own citizens. If you think for one second they wouldn't "poison pill" security tools bound for rural nations, that would be awfully naive.
Makes perfect sense, in the same way that banning Chinese devices in government networks makes sense.
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If they were truly concerned about US software they'd ban Windows entirely.
They will, when the replacements are mature enough.
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It takes time to migrate away from the Microsoft (or any other) ecosystem, the time to initiate the process is when you see the need approaching on the horizon. Office365 has group collaboration options that afaik are only matched by Google Office (or whatever it's called) and that particular migration path makes no sense if you are reducing dependencies on the US.