According to a report by the Australian Financial Review,
governments from around the world including Australia, America, Great
Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, a.k.a. the 'Five Eyes,' have banned
their intelligence and defence departments from using computers designed
by Chinese company Lenovo.
The
report claims that the ban has been in place since 2005, the year
that Lenovo acquired the PC arm of computer giant IBM. While the latter
company continues to do business in servers and mainframes for
governments, Lenovo has been dropped. It's been suggested that this is
yet another aspect of the Prism revelations: since the five governments
have been sharing information using the same classified networks, it's
evidently essential that they all adopt the same security policies.
The justification for the ban is apparently as a result of intense
security tests carried out on the computers which found vulnerabilities
not only in the hardware, but also in the firmware. The study and
subsequent ban pointed specifically to “malicious circuits” and firmware
embedded in chipsets produced in Lenovo’s native China. The tests,
carried out by MI5 and MI6, discovered the potential for backdoor access
to the systems. This could effectively allow people with knowledge of
the system to remotely access any device, without setting off any alarm
bells.
Reacting to the news, Lenovo dismissed the nearly decade-old ban by
pointing out that the same governments still use their technology for
unclassified networks. A spokesperson for Lenovo said that its products
have "been found time and time again to be reliable and secure by our
enterprise and public sector customers and we always welcome their
engagement to ensure we are meeting their security needs”.
As reported in The Daily Telegraph,
the UK Home Office has refused to divulge whether they make use of
Lenovo products for the UK's secret networks. In a press statement,
GCHQ said: “As a matter of policy we don’t routinely discuss the names
or nature of suppliers to GCHQ on any aspect of our business”.
If you have concerns about computer security, you can help make your data more secure by using a VPN service. The VPN
works as an additional layer of protection that stands between the data
stored on your device and any external users attempting to access it.