Chambers: We Are Making It Tougher For Agencies To Tamper With Cisco Gear

John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems, said the networking leader is going to make it tougher for groups like the US National Security Agency (NSA) to meddle with Cisco gear for surveillance purposes.

"We are going to make [Cisco] equipment very difficult to tamper with," Chambers said in a recent interview with CRN. "We are going to ship it with a lot of information on it, and we are going to say 'How do we do this better than anyone else?'"

Cisco will alert customers at any sign of their Cisco equipment having been compromised, Chambers added.

"If we find anyonedoesn't matter if it's hackers or governmentsinvolved in any of our customer environments anywhere in the world, we tell our customers, period," Chambers said. "And we do that in the US, in Europe and China and India. And we have done it."

Chambers' comments to CRN came roughly two months after the book No Place To Hide by Glenn Greenwald showed photos suggesting the NSA had intercepted Cisco networking gear being shipped overseas to install backdoors for surveillance.

Chambers wrote a letter to President Obama, just days after the photos hit, asking him to curb NSA spying efforts. Chambers said in the letter that the confidence of Cisco customers globally is becoming "eroded" by revelations of US government spying.

When asked if the US government has given Cisco any assurance that it is not tampering with Cisco gear, Chambers said he didn't know of "any government that has given those assurances."

The 19-year Cisco CEO said the company does not share the core software supporting its technology because "if you get the software you can eventually, with the processing power, figure out how to break it."

"We don't provide backdoors," he said.

Cisco's business abroad has taken a hit in the aftermath of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In Cisco's third-quarter earnings report released in May, the company said product orders in emerging markets fell 7 percent compared to the same period last year. Cisco's business in Brazil, meanwhile, was down 27 percent, while its business in Russia and China was down 28 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

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Chambers: We Are Making It Tougher For Agencies To Tamper With Cisco Gear