Police seize counterfeit SFP transceivers

[Griz]

Source: http://news.sky.com/story/police-seize-fake-it-equipment-worth-up-to-1m-10965166

 

Quote

Police have seized more than 1,000 counterfeit items of computer hardware, which could potentially have fetched almost £1m. Following a tip-off from IT networking business Cisco, officers from the City of London Police's intellectual property crimes unit (PIPCU) found the dodgy equipment at an address in Herne Bay in Kent. The total value of the items seized if sold individually at full list price could have been £996,000, although it is very rare for equipment to be sold like that and would more likely have netted the sellers £300,000.
 

An image of the equipment seized appears to show Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) transceivers, extremely expensive equipment which converts electrical signals to optical signals within communication networks.
 

Detective Sergeant Ives told Sky that the equipment could have been purchased by public sector bodies and - being of lower quality that official networking equipment - may have failed and disrupted their network.

 

As some of the customers may have been part of the public sector it would be catastrophic for some of them if there networks were to fail or be disrupted. As said in the article "While there is no evidence that the seized hardware had been maliciously tampered with to implant malware on victims' devices, its lower quality could have put consumers at risk." this obviously would be a massive issue if the hardware had/has been tampered with especially if it was installed in public sector networks.

 

(Don't really know anything about this technology but interesting nonetheless)

Edited July 29, 2017 by GoodBytes
Quote fixed

[NinJake]

Psh, they were doing it wrong the whole time....

 

<_<

>_>

[Lurick]

Depending on how good/bad they tried to fake the gear it might not have even been recognized when inserted. Cisco and other vendors do have checks to make sure SFPs that are being inserted are supported and valid. There are commands to get around this but you have to know what you're doing to bypass the checks and it's not something that can be done with the SFP  

 

Edit: Just surprised they didn't target the 100G and 400G SFP markets. A single long-range (Single-Mode) 100G optic rated for 10km has a list price of between 20k to 30k.

[Griz]

Ah right, I don't really know anything about the technology just found it interesting

 

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, Griz said:

Ah right, I don't really know anything about the technology just found it interesting

 

Yah, it's very interesting.

To sum it up. SFP stands for Small Form-Factor Portable and they come in dozens of different varieties and generally target fiber but there are 1Gb copper SFPs as well along with pre-terminated copper cables with SFPs on either end of set lengths. They plug into a port and can turn an empty port into a 10G fiber port for example. Some hardware only supports 1G SFPs and other supports 1/10/25/40/50/100G flavors of SFPs through various adapters and whatnot so you can take a high density switch and not be stuck with a single speed.

[TheRandomness]

-Thread moved to Tech News and Reviews.

[mr moose]

Just goes to show how far knock offs can go.  Makes me a little concerned when buying oem (not in box) hardware online.