Posted on 05/22/2012 8:42:58 AM PDT by the scotsman
'More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed.
A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force's largest cargo plane. The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said.
"This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs," committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said. "It underscores China's failure to police the blatant market in counterfeit parts - a failure China should rectify," he added.
As part of a year-long investigation, the US Government Accountability Office created a fictitious company and purchased electronic parts on the internet. Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers. The components came from suppliers based in China - which Senator Levin described as the "epicentre of electronic part counterfeiting".
The report accused Beijing of openly allowing counterfeiting operations, and said attempts by officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the probe had failed. US authorities and contract companies contributed to the problem by not detecting the fakes and routinely failing to report them, the report said.
The Defense Department was also criticised for lacking "knowledge of the scope and impact of counterfeit parts on critical defence systems".
Committee member Senator John McCain said the prevalence of bogus parts made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to "our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it".'
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
You guys are hilarious. But I’d feel better if you ninnies were on their side leading them around with hare-brained concepts.
It goes like this:
Chinese intelligence identifies equipment component stream of classified US systems electronics and sets about inserting altered components containing hardware bots into the end products.
US purchases from US GSA-approved vendor. GSA approved vendor outsources parts manufacturing to licensed manufactures in other countries. The licensed manufacturers orders some component chips from suppliers who blend in Chinese counterfeit chips for remarkable price reductions. The counterfeit chips are fronted by PLA-influenced manufacturers offering components to these ~specific~ buyers at too-good-to-be-true pricing. Chinese bots are now the GSA-approved product.
And that is one way how the PLA gets hardware bots inside classified US systems.
I remember reading about a similar scandal out here in WA, some time ago.
True. There are only a few on this thread who understand it though.
Look at #53. sigh.
I buy parts from China. Have had good luck so far.
If I had to buy from US suppliers the stuff would cost an arm and a leg.
Here are some example prices I pay. (shipping is included in these prices) I usually buy from A Thai supply house but they are all China parts.
20mhz crystals .07
4 AA cell battery pack .17
1n4007 diode .01
LM317 regulator .10
L78L05 regulator .09
3v Piezo Buzzer .48
8 pin DIP IC Socket .02
1000uF Electrolytic Capacitor .05
10uF Electrolytic Capacitor .01
PN2222A Transistor .03
Dip Switch 8 Positions .20
5K OHM Trimpot .06
Plastic knobs for pots .19
CONDENSER MIC .25
small val ceramic caps .01
LM567 .23
SM micro USB connector .23
You just can’t make anything at a reasonable price unless you buy China parts. The same quality plastic knobs are over a dollar from US supply houses...sometimes way over a dollar...it’s just a fraction of a pennies worth of plastic.
The real problem with Chinese parts is safety. The Chinese use sub-standard steel that doesn’t seem to be properly cured, creating weak spots that give at crucial points.
BP was using Chinese made parts on their newest oil tankers and was having a terrible time with parts breaking off, while at sea. BP was trying to blame it on the Captain who headed their fleet, but it wasn’t his fault. He wanted all the Chinese parts replaced. I’m not sure what the outcome was, but it was a real problem for a while.
Ever hear of a 4-20mA interface?
Wanna bet it can’t be down scaled to µA or even nA?
I’m afraid you misunderstood what I was concerned about. It was not so much that certain parts might be used to compromise our systems. (Yes that can happen believe me I know how much “testing” tends to “miss”.)
What concerned me was an interruption of spare parts needed to wage war. If domestic industry can’t provide the parts in the quality and design required your talking about an interruption in a supply chain that poses a military threat.
This has been known for a long time. What’s news is we aren’t doing anything about it.
Years ago, I bought one of those 5-foot long outlet strips from Fry's. It featured about 8 outlets well spaced, so it was easy to use every outlet with a wall wart.
I had installed it at my desk. After a few weeks, I noticed some suspicious intermittent buzzing noises, which I traced to the strip. I could jiggle some of the plugs and induce, or stop the buzzing. So at that point I figured I'd have to tear it open and see what was up.
What I found was the strangest excuses for solder joints I had seen in 50 years, even including my own beginning work back in the 50's. ≤}B^)
Many of the joints between the wire bus and the tab at the rear of each socket contact were tenuous at best. And the flux, ahhh, the flux! It was hard, vitreous, and green, in many cases insulating the mutual areas of contact between the bus wire, the socket tab, and the sorry-looking blob of solder.
I cut up, unsoldered, and removed the bus wires, cleaned up the socket tabs, replaced the bus wires with new, and resoldered everything. Took about five hours, but at least I finally had a reliable outlet strip.
I theorize that these were made (in China, of course) in dozens of little cottage shops dotting the countryside, where many of them had no notion of proper soldering technique. Some old rural Chinese lore probably told them to use pond scum for solder flux. And the go-go Chinese entrepeneur had set up these little feeder shops and aggregated them to fulfill the orders from the US retailers. Quality control? Process? Sorry, round-eyes, no time for them!
I later heard of lawsuits against Fry's over these strips. I presume some of them damaged the connected equipment, or even started fires.
I know the outcome. Click to see it.
No, it goes like this, as often observed in the non-military procurement chain, now (not surprisingly) being seen in cots programs etc:
Chinese contract manufacturers produce wafers for parts from "fabless" manufacturers from their masks.
They may make 100 thousand or easily as many as 500 thousand extra parts accidentally when a PO was canceled.
When scrapping those parts, they walk out the back door to someone's wive's brother's dad's distribution company in Taiwan or Singapore.
So far, it's one legit company doing contract work for one OEM, and one sleight of hand from a shady dude thrice removed.
--back to Justa's flow-- US purchases from US GSA-approved vendor. GSA approved vendor outsources parts manufacturing to licensed manufactures in other countries. The licensed manufacturers orders some component chips from suppliers who blend in "Chinese counterfeit" chips for remarkable price reductions. The counterfeit chips are fronted by legitimate manufacturers offering components to these ~specific~ buyers at too-good-to-be-true pricing. Identical counterfeit parts are now the GSA-approved product. --back out--
And that is one way how an industrious chinese con-men sell perfectly good parts (that would've otherwise been thrown away) inside classified US systems.
See? No chinese PLA 007's, car chases, involved or espionage mind control heat rays required!!!
This happens all the time, and it ought to be costing the OEM's billions. But in many cases the parts were overbuilt because they were EOL'd and the OEM wouldn't have made any money off the scrapped parts anyhow.
"PLA Bots" are not in resistors and capacitors, and anyway, the former has not been found or reported, the latter HAS BEEN FOUND and REPORTED, and thus, Occam prefers the latter.
Ummm, where did you study Electrical Engineering?
You must be 12 years old.
“Even a USB plug can host an embedded firmware trojan”
Easily done, I made up a gag USB cable once. I put a sm ATtiny85 inside the molded connector. I drilled it out and very carefully put the sm chip and two 3.6v zeners in there along with a few other tiny sm parts. Then I filled the hole using JB weld and spray painted the molded housing to make it look normal again.
When you plugged the thing in it was detected as a keyboard.
It would type odd things at random times :-) lol
Would be child’s play to create something similar that was sinister.
Imagine how many unknown surreptitious functions could be integrated into the keyword you’re using right now.
Well, that has absolutely nothing to do with boycotting any parts with chinese content.
It depends on what you consider "parts."
Is a military GPS plug-in radio a "part" or are the chips in them the "parts" you're talking about?
The fact is, when a war heats up in the pacific, the entire global electronics and industrial economy will come to a halt.
Because every single TV, computer, phone whatever whatever has parts from singapore, taiwan, japan, germany, china, USA, etc.
One chip goes unavailable and the whole system can't be built.
So when that happens, the military damn well better have appropriate "spare systems" available for the necessary duration, that's true. But it won't matter if the spare systems have chinese components in them.
lol
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