HP Showed Russia Pentagons Cyberdefense Software
November 7, 2017
This is a short honk to point out a startling discovery—EtherealMind.com declares, “Reuters: HP Enterprise Let Russia Scrutinize Cyberdefense System Used by Pentagon.” Citing a recent report from Reuters, writer Greg Ferro pinpoints the problem with companies that make nothing but deals:
A sales company is one that sells products: any product, to anyone, anywhere for the right price. The technology giants have been buying products from various OEMs, bundling them up and reselling to customers for the last 20 years. HPE wanted to sell a security product, Arcsight, to a big customer who wanted to review the source code. Thats normal. But sales doesn’t care about company wide issues so they let the Russian government review the source of a product that US government uses to protect its network: ‘Hewlett Packard Enterprise allowed a Russian defense agency to review the inner workings of cyber defense software used by the Pentagon to guard its computer networks, according to Russian regulatory records and interviews with people with direct knowledge of the issue.’
Yikes. Ferro wonders whether evolutions in technology and business practices will soon render sales companies like HP, Cisco, and Dell obsolete. Perhaps.
Cynthia Murrell, November 7, 2017