Are there really undocumented features and bookmarks in the products of Cisco, Juniper, Avaya and others like them?

Question

Information Security

I heard several times about disconnecting Cisco devices during the conflict in the Balkans, but Google stubbornly does not share anything (or I am not forming the request in the right way). Was it really like that? Share, please, verified links (not yellow and not jingoistic sites).

Answer 1

Have you already thought about what will happen if the facts of the presence of something like this are made public, verified and confirmed? And you thought what efforts are being spent to prevent this from happening?

Answer 2

There is a difference between undocumented features and bookmarks.
Undocumented features may have nothing to do with backdoors.
There are also exploits (not yet closed and unknown to the manufacturer), they also allow access to the system. It is possible, regardless of the desire of the manufacturer, to gain access to the equipment.
You can find information on the Edward Snowden tag on Habré.

Answer 3

I also remember something similar about airplanes - they sold (like France) airplanes to someone, and when NATO (or someone else) sent troops there, they SUDDENLY couldn’t take off all at once - they were “turned off”.
P.S. - Google also does not give out links

Answer 4

I will now tell you in secret how it is done. Only no one! OK??? In short, let's say we sell a piece of hardware with firmware 1.001 to the customer. The most important thing is to have a way to get a version from this piece of iron. Let's call this feature a feature! Implementing this is simple.
Stage number 2 (optional). We make subscription to firmware paid. This creates a step for us. We can always take advantage of old vulnerabilities (which, due to sloppiness or economy, have not been closed). You can modify the firmware for the return of a specific country.
Stage number 3. In each new firmware (under the pretext of an Indian goat with crooked hands), we lay a bookmark. If it was not found ... then we leave it until the next firmware. If found. then we begin to tear our hair at the opera house and defiantly shout to the whole world that the Indians are freaks and we will fix everything right now. And we insert another accumulated bookmark from what was sent to us from the NSA. And in the NSA there are Indian mathematicians with Einstein's aikyu, who not only make bookmarks based on complex mathematical methods, but also pretend that this bookmark is just another mistake.
Stage number infinity. Everything goes on ad infinitum. And I will pay attention to what spit open source software or not. Indians are not really stupid. It is easy to pretend that they screwed up out of stupidity. It's hard to blame them. Therefore, with each new firmware, everything returns to normal.

Answer 5

Of course, you will not find information about this on the official websites of the CIS or the US government. However, if you sit down and do a painstaking google on the same Kosovo, Yugoslavia and the equipment of a well-known brand, some links can be found. Believe them or not - your business.
Additional clues for Google: document time around that time, pdf file type, English language only. Separately, you can see the history of the Yugoslav operators of that time.