Imagethief was interested to see an article discussing the security problems of Chinese counterfeits of networking equipment on the breathlessly named "Law and Justice" section of the ABC television network's website. What I found interesting was not that there are Chinese counterfeits of Cisco gear, nor that there is some concern over whether such gear may present security risks. It's that the only confirmed security breach in the story was the FBI's leak of its presentation on the investigation, which was apparently not meant to be public:

Counterfeit Chinese Technology: Gateway for Hackers?

The FBI is investigating whether counterfeit routers and computer hardware from China installed in U.S. government computer networks might provide a secret gateway for hackers to tap into secure government databases.

Sources told ABC News the counterfeit hardware could represent a major breach to national security. An FBI PowerPoint presentation, which somehow ended up on a Web site, lays out the concerns and the breadth of what has been a far-reaching investigation.

Friday afternoon a somewhat miffed FBI released a statement that read: "At the request of another federal government agency, on Jan. 11, 2008, the FBI's Cyber Division provided an unclassified PowerPoint presentation and briefing on efforts to counter the production and distribution of counterfeit network hardware," said FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director James Finch. "This unclassified briefing was never intended for broad distribution or posting to the Internet."

Still, "FBI accidentally publishes PowerPoint" just won't suck in the readers the same way that a headline that implies a vast, shadowy Chinese spy plot will. Meanwhile, a Cisco spokesperson had this rather less alarming thing to say:

[The] company has extensively tested counterfeit equipment purporting to be made by the company, and though not "technically inconceivable," the company's tests "have not found a single instance of software or hardware that was modified to make them more vulnerable to security threats."

Sounds like we're a ways short of technical armageddon. Sounds like US government institutions might want to check their sourcing, and the FBI might want to check its document policies. Meanwhile, as long as people will clock on anything that promises a glimpse of Par!s Hilton's tits (a secret not unknown to the Chinese), a good, old-fashioned Trojan Horse is probably still the best way into most networks. As always, the worst security risks are the most prosaic.