[W9RCA-News] Caution on Chinese handheld transceivers

[Jim Keeth]

Interesting!  
BTW, Digital Globe Inc. is a company involved with satellite imaging.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "George Gadbois" <w3fey at verizon.net>
> Subject: Fw: Unclassified via Army & Navy MARS
> Date: March 13, 2013 2:14:08 PM EDT
> To: "Jim Keeth" <af9a at arrl.net>,	"Phil Moorhead" <moorheap at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Tom Hartranft" <tomturkey at dejazzed.com>,	"Jim Hartranft" <kb3zge at gmail.com>
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Randy Maurer
> To: undisclosed-recipients:
> Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 5:29 PM
> Subject: Unclassified via Army & Navy MARS
> 
> *** Reading 93 bytes from logbook.adi
> *** NO RECORDS IN FILE
> DE AAR3FK NR 007
> R 121201Z MAR 2013
> FM AAR3FK
> TO 3X1B
> BT
> UNCLAS
> SUBJ: SECURITY INFORMATION
> 
> A Dangerous Bargain 
> Gary Geissler, a Colorado-based IT specialist and high-tech advisor to Army MARS, sends this
> caution about a dangerous bargain in the ham radio marketplace.
> 
> The best buy these days in handheld transceivers are the ones from Hong Kong.  
> The HTs are being purchased by amateurs, public service providers, and others 
> in government organizations.  Some versions have FCC and other type acceptance.  
> The transceivers sell for a fraction of the price of comparable units from the 
> big three yet can work all the amateur and public service frequencies from the 
> civil aircraft band to the top of the public service UHF band.  They have many 
> memories and features and can be programmed from a PC.  Powered by big lithium 
> ion batteries (included) they are a steal for $55.00.  
> 
> Or so it would seem.
>  
> I work for Digital Globe Incorporated.  As our corporation is an important 
> government contractor we are working with the USG to resolve issued as they 
> appear with regard to computer and Internet security.  The software tools we 
> use are among the strongest available anywhere (and as a result, the most 
> intrusive and painful!)
>  
> So when I put the tiny driver CD that came with my [Chinese] handheld 
> transceiver's programming cable into a machine to scan it I had no idea that 
> the disk would pull an immediate alert.  The alert was so strong that I could 
> not go any further and determine contents, files, names of virus, and so forth.
>  
> The CD was given to our computer security department. They will process it and 
> forward the results to their USG contact. This is only the second time I have 
> seen an alert this strong.  The other time (last week actually) was while 
> downloading a .pdf research paper from a university researcher's site.
>  
> Lest anyone think otherwise, we are under attack.  One might suspect that the 
> "real" object of the exercise with regard to the very low cost of the Hong 
> Kong HTs is the unseen present on the CDs.  I'm not a conspiracy theory sort 
> of guy; we can talk more about this at some point.
>  
> I might suggest a neutrally worded warning to destroy any driver CDs that come 
> with Hong Kong HTs; the Prolific USB/RS-232 drivers are available at no charge 
> from US sites and the public domain open source CHIRP software is more than 
> adequate for programming the radios in any event.
>  
> Gary  AAR8GI
> UNCLASSIFIED
> BT
> NNNN
> NNN0EBC DE NNN0IOF
> INT ZEV
> K
> 
> 

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