South Korea’s military has been forced to remove over 1,300 surveillance cameras from its bases after learning that they could be used to transmit signals to China, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
The cameras, which were supplied by a South Korean company, “were found to be designed to be able to transmit recorded footage externally by connecting to a specific Chinese server,” the outlet reported an unnamed military official as saying.
Korean intelligence agencies discovered the cameras’ Chinese origins in July during an examination of military equipment, the outlet said.
How the fuck did that happen?
Dear south korean government
please hire me instead. I promise I’m so paranoid, this will never happen.
Suppliers lie.
I know a guy who is the sole reason that software written by <adversary> isnt being currently used in <host countries most top secret defense environment>. His boss told him to lie if asked, and he refused to and informed <end user>.
Like every military operation, the job always goes to the lowest bidder, that is still overpriced, because it’s just tax money. That’s what always cracks me up about stuff that is marketed as military grade.
It’s still expensive because everything has to go through OPSEC.
It’s expensive because it has to go through a dozen layers of private contractors.
The US military was remarkably good at rapidly churning out cheap, effective armorments during the WW and early Cold War era. But the LBJ/Nixon pivot to private industry eroded all the efficiency. Then Reagan kicked military spending into overdrive in the 80s, and it’s been a snowball of waste, fraud, and embezzlement ever since.
Now the model for military procurement is just a jobs program for Congressional districts. The epitome of the Do Nothing profession.
Capitalism. They just bought the cheapest reliable enough option they could find and didn’t give two craps about infosec, because that’s too expensive to actually properly do. Minimize the financial losses of an upfront purchase. (I worked more than enough jobs in hardware design to know what management cares about and what it doesn’t)
Also, big yikes for the Israel flag in your username.
I think this is more of an OPSEC issue than an Infosec one, but both terms work.
Cheap devices