Chinese Media: Cisco Is Playing on US Cyberspy Team

Today in international  news: China accuses Cisco of being a cyberspying accomplice. Also: An Iranian judge summons Mark Zuckerberg to court to answer privacy complaints; Beijing looks to rid instant messaging apps of everything from terror talk to porn; and Aussie Apple users report hijacked devices.

Cisco has been accused of being in bed with U.S. cyberspying efforts, according to a Chinese state media outlet.

Cisco "carries on intimately" with U.S. spying apparatuses, the outlet claims, and plays "a disgraceful role" in efforts to prop up U.S. power over the Web.
Cisco denied the accusations.
Beijing definitely seems to have taken umbrage with last week's U.S. indictments of five members of China's People's Liberation Army, accused by the Justice Department of cyberespionage. In the days since, China has

• announced intensified scrutiny of IT products and services;
• banned Windows 8 from government computers;
• released a report detailing America's "unscrupulous" cybersurveillance; and
• reportedly pressured banks to remove high-end servers from IBM -- and replace them with a local brand.

Cisco was among Beijing's first targets following Congress' late-2012 decree that Huawei and ZTE -- a pair of Chinese telecommunications giants -- should not be allowed to work on U.S. networks.
Cisco was promptly booted from one of China's main networks in favor of China Unicom; shortly thereafter, the anti-Cisco campaign intensified with accusations of lax security.
[Source: The New York Times]