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Cisco denies complicity of top executive accepting $10 million contract as NSA backdoor payoff

"Cisco Senior Vice President Chris Young was previously at RSA but his responsibilities at that company did not include oversight of the authentication business that allegedly collaborated with the NSA to weaken encryption levels in certain products."

Hummelstown, PA:   Mon, 2/17/14 - 11:59pm    View comments
 

It's been 7-long weeks and still not a single update has been made to PSIRT-1384943056, Cisco's official security incident response to public allegations of NSA backdoors secretly implanted within Cisco products. Cisco continues to standby its following statement of innocence:

"Cisco does not work with any government to weaken our products, nor are we compelled to do so for any reason. Our interest is in supporting our customers (regardless of where they are located) and continuing to strengthen our products against any sort of compromise."

That's why I find this Reuters news story of interest:

"RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software. No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists."

Chris Young, Senior Vice President of Products at RSA. "The distribution of RSA BSAFE Share products offers essential cryptographic tools — that are wholly interoperable with the existing RSA BSAFE installed base — for corporate and independent developers who are considering application development projects for which the use of licensed commercial code is, today, economically not practical."

"Previously, he served as Senior Vice President, Products at RSA, the security division of EMC, where he was responsible for strategy, product management, product marketing, engineering, and delivery of products across all of RSA's identity and access assurance, security information and event management, governance risk and compliance and data security solutions. He built the company's identity protection and verification business, which today protects more than 200 million online accounts."

"No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists."

Here's the concern I presented to Cisco:

To be accurate for the benefit of Cisco's security customers, I think Cisco should address the "issue" that perhaps its top security product executive, Christopher Young, did indeed work with the NSA and accepted a $10 million fee on behalf of his employer, RSA, in doing so.

Related stories:

Top secret document contradicts Cisco's denial of NSA spy cooperation

Top Secret National Security Agency (NSA) JETPLOW firmware persistence implant (backdoor) for Cisco firewalls
 

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