Trust your vendor? Not really: report

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 10:14

Business IT - Technology

IT users are far too trusting of the information given to them by vendors when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Yet according to at least one respected research group, it seems ICT vendors are about as trustworthy as used car dealers and should be treated with caution.

According to leading ICT research group Ovum, in a report titled - “Can you trust your vendor?” – the research firm says that vendors who fail to establish their integrity should be “struck off supplier short lists.”

Ovum’s strongly worded warning to buyers of ICT equipment and services follows what the advisory firm says is its discovery of undocumented privileged administrator accounts in new network routers belonging to two telecoms service providers.

Graham Titterington, information security principal analyst at Ovum, claims this raises serious concern about the motives of the people or organisations who created them, and he says, these ‘back doors’ could be used for both “active and passive attacks on the networks,” and they call into question the reliability of the vendor and its products.

“This is not the first time that we have seen attempts to hack into enterprise and carrier networks by infiltrating network routers.”

“At the time of the Athens Olympic Games, rogue software in four mobile switching centres illegally intercepted calls by Greek politicians, including the Prime Minister, for a year. After the discovery of the software, both the network operator and the equipment vendor were fined several million euros.

“More recently, the US government detected an attack on IT systems in the Pentagon in 2007 in which 1,500 computers were found to have been compromised.”

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