The ‘five eyes’ governments don’t trust Lenovo – should you?

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.