One of the Snowden documents published by Glenn Greenwald with the release of his new book is a photo showing an actual NSA Tailored Access Operations team sabotaging a Cisco router before it is exported, a practice reported earlier this week in a story Greenwald wrote for the Guardian.
The great irony is that this kind of sabotage is exactly the sort of thing that the USA has repeatedly accuse Chinese authorities of doing to Huawei routers, something for which we have no evidence. Unlike the photographic evidence we have here of the NSA doing this to a Cisco router.
Here’s how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc,) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination. All of this happens with the support of Intelligence Community partners and the technical wizards in TAO.
Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant [Sean Gallagher/Ars Technica]
