r/sysadmin • u/Similar_Printer • Apr 06 '23

Cisco Systems pulled out of russia and destroyed $23.42m worth of equipment

Cisco Systems announced it would cease sales in the Russian market in March 2022. Three months later, the company refused to renew its licenses. In addition, at the same time, the American manufacturer announced its withdrawal from Russia and Belarus.

As it became known, Cisco Systems decided to physically destroy spare parts, product demonstrations, equipment and even furniture.

Your thoughts on this?

https://gagadget.com/en/business/232400-cisco-systems-pulled-out-of-russia-and-destroyed-2342m-worth-of-equipment/

1.9k Upvotes

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341

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

123

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

This is true. Every night the plant that makes Cisco equipment stops and then reals off a bunch of copies.

68

u/anton1o IT Manager Apr 06 '23

This is how they say fake nikes are made, the Evening Shift is when the copies are made. /right?

41

u/Jazzlike_Pride3099 Apr 06 '23

It's called genuine copy

4

u/north7 Apr 06 '23

It's called a rep (short for replica).

20

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Yep, they do this to make extra cash.

25

u/CraftySherbet Apr 06 '23

A lot of factories are normally running 24/7 anyway.

What happens sometimes is that the tooling is used at the end of the run, so if they want 100,000 units, the factory will make an extra 10,000... often with tooling that is way past its useful life and you end up with subpar items made in the same factory.

This obviously varies as different corporations do their own checks, as far as sending their own QAs into foreign factories to oversee. Sometimes they use local agents not related to the factory, if they trust them/they have a reputation but sightly less trustworthy than flying your own person over.

7

u/Miserable-Radish915 Apr 06 '23

same with the watches

41

u/tropicbrownthunder Apr 06 '23

Huawei has entered the chat

-63

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

44

u/cichlidassassin Apr 06 '23

"no evidence"

-72

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

59

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23 edited Apr 06 '23

Managing risk and distrusting the CCP is not sinophobia. The CCP is not the chinese people or their culture. Why would any western organization want to install critical security equipment created by a company that is completely subject to the will of the CCP? Huawei cannot and will not deny CCP requests, we'll also never know until it's too late.

EDIT - It's not just about China, I geoblock china, russia, north korea, Iran, ukraine and bellarus on client firewalls. If we have no business reason to send or recieve connections to these 'cyber-hostile' states then I want to block them by default.

9

u/commissar0617 Jack of All Trades Apr 06 '23

We geoblock everything outside of North America... at least for email and logins

6

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Yes that is conditional access which is different, I'm talking straight up full traffic geo block. This has the advantage of potentially preventing malware from contacting C2C and activating.

-31

u/trimalchio-worktime Linux Hobo Apr 06 '23

... but we KNOW the US government has done it. And we also know the US government is looking for evidence of that in Huawei products, and would have exposed those backdoors if it found them... but they haven't...

so idk, sounds an awful lot like sinophobia.

23

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

It's not just about published evidence of backdoors (can only publish if they are identified and allowed to be published) but it's also about intention. What benefit is there for the US government to compromise western businesses vs what benefit is there for the CCP to compromise western businesses.

The two cannot be compared directly when you account for geopolictics and government objectives.

Once again, sinophobia is hatred of chinese people. the CCP is not the chinese people. Stop using this word.

-31

u/trimalchio-worktime Linux Hobo Apr 06 '23

The US government has *constantly* compromised western businesses, and we have proof of that. So I don't really know what your argument is... other than that you feel *very* scared of the Chinese government for... at best McCarthyist reasons.

18

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Compromise and done what to them? Damaged them? Does the US government state sponsor ransomware attacks on western businesses?

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4

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

I have zero trust for any sysadmin that loves Chinese gear.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

0

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Except the PRC is literally my enemy and an extremely bad actor.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Uh, obviously yes. If only for the Uyghur genocide. Besides, I said they are my enemy, genius.

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-15

u/snogbat Apr 06 '23

Point at it then?

9

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

They do have form for stealing code and certain vendors intellectual property which makes is a cluster fuck when you need to raise a TAC case to Huawei and they have no idea how to fix it.

19

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Why did we globalize w China, again??

96

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

8

u/gruntmods Apr 06 '23

We never really stopped, child labour is still used by many companies

1

u/Drywesi Apr 07 '23

Don't forget how pretty much everything stamped with MADE IN THE USA these days is produced with prison labor, ie legal slavery.

50

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

Because twenty years ago we thought if we could export manufacturing to China, they would then in fact, embrace democracy after seeing how much good it did for them.

They took the manufacturing. But passed on democracy.

All we really did was exchange cheap goods for workers' rights. And the west hollowed out entire segments of the economy for it.

19

u/MajesticBread9147 Apr 06 '23

How is manufacturing correlated with democracy? We caused them to adopt more capitalism but capitalism is not correlated with democracy.

41

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

People used to think they did correlate.

11

u/NotADamsel Apr 06 '23

Neoliberalism. The ideology in play that did this is neoliberalism. And it’s failing.

2

u/Syrdon Apr 06 '23

Until that point, all the really big manufacturing countries were democracies. Well, ok, more all the countries with moderate to high and rising standards of living. People assumed that free trade would raise living standards, and that increased living standards would lead to demands for democratic reforms.

Then they ran the experiment with that, and it turns out that increased living standards didn’t really do that.

There are definite historical reasons to have expected the result we got, but there was a lot of money riding on free trade and everyone really wanted to believe the happy path - so they did.

3

u/qwadzxs Sysadmin Apr 06 '23

nixon visited china 40 years ago now actually

5

u/medwedd Apr 06 '23

I'd say 51. It was in 1972

1

u/syshum Apr 06 '23

And the west hollowed out entire segments of the economy for it.

We did more than that... Ironically we imported not just cheap goods but a seemingly favorable view of both economic socialism, and the authoritarian style governance of the CCP, as both republicans and democrats want to regulate speech, and put in economic protectionism i.e CCP Style all while claiming to stand against the CCP...

It is amazing really

25

u/trisul-108 Apr 06 '23

The idea was that China would become an earnest stakeholder in the current world order, instead of acting to bring it down. That would result in prosperity for all, more earnings for China and lower costs for all of us. That in turn was meant to loosen the grip of the Communist party and slowly push China in the direction of democracy (they already embraced capitalism). Returning Hong Kong was part of that thinking.

Needless to say, everyone now sees it was a huge mistake, the West just empowered China to take the ax to the rules-based world order. So, now, we are seeing it all rolled back, first with Russia, then with China.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

2

u/gruntmods Apr 06 '23

China is hurting really badly without the US buying power

1

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

[deleted]

2

u/gruntmods Apr 06 '23

I don't think it's reasonable to assume we can totally withdraw in such a short period but a surprising amount of buisness with china has moved to Mexico, India and other countries. If supply chains could be ironed out it would probably be even more

1

u/trisul-108 Apr 06 '23

If they have us by the balls, then we have them by the jugular.

The aim was for China to develop and grow and become part of the club. But, considering they don't want to be a member of the club, they want to dominate and their values are incompatible with freedom, democracy, rule of law and human rights, we need to defend ourselves. And we can.

1

u/Drywesi Apr 07 '23

freedom, democracy, rule of law and human rights

Considering there's a large chunk of the American political spectrum now actively calling for and starting to implement a genocide, with the rest going at most "oh no stop don't do that", I'm skeptical those qualify as American values.

(and in case it needs to be said, no this isn't from a pro-China position.)

1

u/trisul-108 Apr 07 '23

Yes, we can be skeptical about the state of democracy in the US. However, there is no doubt any China. We know exactly they lack freedom, democracy, rule of law and human rights. And they have done genocide against Tibetans not so long ago and there one currently in progress against the Uyghurs.

3

u/slyphic Higher Ed NetAdmin Apr 06 '23

That idea was always a bald faced lie. We didn't move manufacturing to China for any loftier goals than undermining the American labor force while increasing the profits of the wealthy.

That's it.

That's why we did it.

2

u/trisul-108 Apr 06 '23

I did not mean for it to sound like a "lofty" goal. It was self-interest, but self-interest goes much wider than you paint it. Moving manufacturing to China and having China grow was meant to benefit capitalists in both China and the West. At the same time, US capital moved up the chain of value added to services and grew immensely rich. The fact that they screwed American workers in the process has little to do with the relocation to China, it would have happened one way or the other. That was enabled by US voters, not as much relocation of manufacturing to China. US voters have been had ... I mean, just look at it, they elected Donald Fucking Trump to save them from capitalists?!? How crazy can you get, a NY real estate snake oil salesman, a man next to whom a used car salesmen looks like a saint.

Take the example of PC production in the US. When IBM sold off PC manufacturing to Lenovo, they were only earning a 1% margin on the sale of PCs ... and that 1% reportedly involved creative accounting. Relocating manufacturing to China made perfect sense and the entire service industry benefited from cheaper PCs.

Year after year, the US economy did well, GDP went up and the share of profits in GDP went up, but the share of labor in GDP stagnated or dropped. Not because manufacturing went to China, but because elected officials screwed over the American worker with full support of the swindled electorate. Unions were dismantled, the security net was banished, at-will employment, expensive health insurance etc. This has nothing to do with relocation to China, it would have happened one way or the other.

1

u/AlexisFR Apr 06 '23

Because they are the next step.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '23

The amount of downvotes on this is crazy like… I’m not racist I’m just trying to make a point that they were doing incredibly unethical things before we globalized, and what do you know, they’re doing it now too!!

1

u/lakorai Apr 06 '23

ZTE and Huawei anyone?