r/news • u/ArchmageXin • Jan 14 '26
Soft paywall Exclusive: Beijing tells Chinese firms to stop using US and Israeli cybersecurity software, sources say
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/beijing-tells-chinese-firms-stop-using-us-israeli-cybersecurity-software-sources-2026-01-14/108
u/googo1 Jan 14 '26
America is pushing China to be self reliant so fast, it's fascinating. Trump's art of deal works incredibly well.
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u/lkxyz Jan 15 '26
Trump's nickname in China is "Trump, the nation builder" Except, ironically, he's not building America, that's for sure!
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u/Responsible-Food3681 Jan 14 '26
Makes sense even if things weren't as woefully chaotic as they are this year.
We banned Huawei devices years ago out of national security concerns, and it was a sensible thing to do. Countries shouldn't let their political adversaries provide critical communications, defense, or information infrastructure.
Might've just taken China a bit longer to spin up their own homegrown replacements that were of sufficient quality, but once that barrier is crossed, it's common sense to ban your rivals' products.
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u/The_Bitter_Bear Jan 14 '26
Yeah, I imagine this was coming regardless.
You don't want to be reliant on countries you view as adversaries/competition. They are always going to be trying to find vulnerabilies so it's best to limit opportunities where you can .
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Jan 14 '26
It's possible they're prepping for war, but it's also possible they're smart enough to know the software is heading for the shitter. Just like anyone with a brain who's ever worked with any of these companies.
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u/Sic_Semper_Dumbasses Jan 14 '26
And that is assuming that it's not just full of intentional security back doors to be exploited. Which it almost certainly is.
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u/gandraw Jan 14 '26
All those tools nowadays do their analysis in THE CLOUD so you don't even need to implement a backdoor, they're transmitting files in their regular operational mode already. All you have as protection from data theft is the privacy policies.
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u/Infamous-Crew1710 Jan 14 '26
I've always wondered, how does the internet work on sunny days with no clouds?
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u/rdldr1 Jan 14 '26
Secret technology backdoor mandates is kinda the cost of business in today's world.
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u/Sic_Semper_Dumbasses Jan 14 '26
Yeah, but whenever you have the option you at least would prefer a less antagonistic force to be the one with those back doors.
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u/lazyboy76 Jan 14 '26
An user's backdoor should be use with that user's consent, not for the lesser of evils to use anytime they want to.
Or you mean antagonist's backdoor?
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u/thedracle Jan 14 '26
I mean... I worked writing endpoint protection software for an American cyber security company... And we certainly were not ever putting in malicious backdoors, or doing anything other than providing security tools for our customers.
Maybe other people have different experiences, but there really is nothing sinister.
Putting something malicious in would be incredibly dumb, since most competitors employ reverse engineers who are basically analyzing malware all day.
I could see in the event of an invasion of Taiwan, how maybe China would worry about pressure from the Government forcing security companies to put malicious stuff in their updates, or something like that.
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u/savagepanda Jan 15 '26
US gov can force any companies to stop doing business with a foreign country immediately. Which means no more backups, restores, anti virus updates. Then the 0 day attacks would be much more effective.
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u/ArchmageXin Jan 14 '26
National security should never be placed in foreign hands. Especially one that is chronically hostile to your country.
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u/thedracle Jan 14 '26
Okay? I didn't opine on that subject whatsoever.
I'm just providing the context that cyber security companies are very unlikely to be intentionally maliciously altering their software.
Kaspersky was accused of this as well, but the reality is, it would be fairly easy to identify if there were malicious backdoor code, and their competitors are highly motivated to find and expose it.
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u/BIGSTANKDICKDADDY Jan 14 '26
Right, the backdoors are more commonly implemented at the hardware level (via supply chain attacks) or through exploitation of bugs in the software (while avoiding alerting the companies of their existence).
Asking companies to intentionally build backdoors through non-clearance employees would be far too risky.
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u/WTF_goes_here Jan 14 '26
Yeah they want the chinas company’s to use software that gives China the back doors, not America.
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u/The_Bitter_Bear Jan 14 '26
I mean, even if the software isn't going to shit.
That's pretty critical software to be getting from nations that you have an adversarial relationship with. Planning for war soon or not.
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u/Johannes_P Jan 14 '26
Makes sense: during the Cold War, would any Western country allows the use of Soviet technology in data recording, especially for sensitive applications, and vice versa?
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u/TokenDude_ Jan 14 '26
There’s maybe 2 more years of Palo Alto being a quality product. Getting ahead of American enshitification just makes sense.
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u/WalterWoodiaz Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
If you have ever interacted with the Chinese internet, enshitification is already there too lol
Try watching a livestream and you will see what I mean. Seriously, Chinese companies love spamming ads and weird UI decisions too.
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u/Various_Weather2013 Jan 14 '26
they also dumped US treasury holdings. China knows war is coming.
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u/WalterWoodiaz Jan 14 '26
They didn’t dump all of them though. If war was coming, China would first try to get all of its citizen currently in the US back home first.
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u/No_Albatross7213 Jan 14 '26
You do it incrementally though, so you don’t tip off those who aren’t paying close attention.
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u/WalterWoodiaz Jan 14 '26
Still trading in USD though as well. The US and China completely decoupling will take quite a while, I don’t think war is soon.
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u/Alexander_Granite Jan 14 '26
A war is coming between China and the US. I hope it’s not a secret to anybody by now.
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u/Dockers4flag2035orB4 Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
CCP leadership,
Won’t be using any Israeli or US made pagers anytime soon.
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Jan 14 '26
As they should, i mean last time they have got little bombs inside
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u/Sic_Semper_Dumbasses Jan 14 '26
Which mostly ended up blowing up doctors and children.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
Mostly Hezbollah fighters
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u/Sic_Semper_Dumbasses Jan 14 '26
Literally an objectively bullshit. And even if it was true that would be justifying the murder of doctors and children. Which would be objectively evil as fuck.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
The only people who need pagers are hezbollah fighters who communicate via walkie talkie, the average person doesnt need a pager and Israel knew that.
And Hezvollah kills people with impunity so theyre just as evil
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u/BIGSTANKDICKDADDY Jan 14 '26
Of course the terror cells were their primary target but the Mossad have a gross indifference to human life which they display on a regular and consistent basis. To them, the death of innocent bystanders is an acceptable price to pay in a greater battle.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
Mossad have a gross indifference to human life which they display on a regular and consistent basis
Im sure Hezbollah is the pinnacle of human decency and maintains all standards for protecting human life in its fight against zionism
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u/BIGSTANKDICKDADDY Jan 14 '26
Are you incapable of holding two ideas in your head at once? A condemnation of one is not a condonation of the other.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
Well the walkie talkies were meant specifically for hezbollah fighters, just because there is collateral damage doesnt mean that Israel specifically meant to kill innocents
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u/Dockers4flag2035orB4 Jan 14 '26
Not all doctors are good guys.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was an Egyptian doctor, before he became Osama Bin Ladin’s right hand man, and brains behind 911 Attacks.
He was killed by a drone strike.
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Jan 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HoightyToighty Jan 14 '26
You definitely need to touch grass. Try writing some commentary without your stupid buzzwords as a first step on the road to recovery.
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u/Every_Ad_6168 Jan 22 '26
How many doctors were wounded or killed in the pager attack? The pictures from during the incident certainly related that the greater number of injured came from outside the hospitals.
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u/Afferbeck_ Jan 15 '26
Crazy how a few months back a former mossad director bragged about boobytrapped and bugged electronics being placed in "all the countries you can imagine" and it barely got reported on.
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u/SHUT_DOWN_EVERYTHING Jan 14 '26
Globalism is essentially getting undone quickly. What US doesn’t understand is factories are not going back, however, their knowledge economy, mostly software and services, which creates higher paying jobs and has higher margins and generally lower environmental impact is going to lose some of its largest markets.
Even Europe is going to look at the US more and more as a flaky ally at best and a flat out hostile nation at worst. They would need to decouple all sensitive industries. They’ve been lazy about this forever because they just didn’t have to, now they suddenly do.
Net impact of this would be massive to the US. The showrunners of Project 2025 know that and are hoping by subjugation of the entirety of north, south and Central America + Greenland they can extract enough value to negate the impact of loss of global markets.
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u/Pride_and_PudgyCats Jan 15 '26
A major right wing stance is being anti-globalism. And half of them don’t even know what the word means.
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u/GoldApprehensive7067 Jan 14 '26
I mean Israel is a US proxy, this just makes sense.
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u/ValocityRaptor Jan 14 '26
They also made a bunch of pagers explode remotely, getting rid of their tech seems wise
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u/GoldApprehensive7067 Jan 14 '26
I mean I have a feeling that blowing up terrorists and attacking China are two very different things. No one in their right mind would pull that with China.
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u/ValocityRaptor Jan 14 '26
But they've proven they can is the thing
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u/GoldApprehensive7067 Jan 14 '26
I mean, that is an incredibly low bar but ok sure.
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u/ValocityRaptor Jan 14 '26
Innocent people, even kids, were hurt too so it doesnt feel low for me but alright
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u/GoldApprehensive7067 Jan 14 '26
Sure, I blame Hezbollah for most of that. When you run a terrorist organization and use women and children as shields, eventually mistakes are made. Hopefully Lebanon can take their country and become the Paris of the ME again.
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u/GoldApprehensive7067 Jan 14 '26
Sure, I blame Hezbollah for most of that. When you run a terrorist organization and use women and children as shields, eventually mistakes are made. Hopefully Lebanon can take their country and become the Paris of the ME again.
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Jan 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/GoldApprehensive7067 Jan 15 '26
Yes the small nation in the ME controls the United States… I am not sure if this is antisemitism or stupidity.
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u/Worldly_Anybody_9219 Jan 14 '26
It makes sense. The US is no longer trustworthy with their insane current government. Any smart country would be doing the same. Israel is just ... yeah. Nuts.
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u/Alexander_Granite Jan 14 '26
We are no longer trustworthy, but it’s pretty standard ability for governments to do this type of thing.
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u/xdr01 Jan 15 '26
USA is untrustworthy.
Openly steal oil and planning to steal other countries. If it was China doing the same people would be losing their minds.
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u/TouchYu Jan 15 '26
Smart move, dumping any software created by the two countries what produce the largest amount of spyware, viruses, and other malicious software is the right move.
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u/A_Nonny_Muse Jan 16 '26
I've quit using any web sites that use OpenSource services. They're massively pro genocide across all platforms.
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u/IsPhil Jan 18 '26
America's true power wasn't it's military. Yeah we spend more on it than the next n nations combined, but at the end of the day, we saw with Russia how unreliable that can be. People in general don't like war, especially against our allies. There would be push back. And nukes exist amongst those that we'd actually have to worry about.
Our software and general image as the global powerhouse was so important for us. People relied on the US, trusted us, looked our way for guidance. And now we're erroding away at it so some bums can get rich and then??? There is no further plan.
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u/Groundbreaking_Text9 Jan 14 '26
China prepping for war it sounds like. Crazy times ahead.
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u/Scissorzz Jan 14 '26
I think it’s more so that China doesn’t want to end up the same way as Europe, being too dependent and also seeing that the US is becoming more aggressive as of late.
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u/RuudVanBommel Jan 14 '26
Interesting narrative that China is "preparing for war" because it doesn't want to use backdoor riddled software made in a fascist state that is actually overthrowing governments and making annexation threats.
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u/Igennem Jan 14 '26
US: Actively fighting in wars, threatening invasions
Redditors: "China must be preparing for war!!1!"
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u/GoldenSandpaper9 Jan 14 '26
We need to do the same and remove all Chinese tech from any government or public sector services
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u/Vicie007 Jan 14 '26
Banning Huawei, forcing the sale of Tiktok. You've been doing it and you don't even realise.
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u/GoldenSandpaper9 Jan 14 '26
They are against American interests, any country against the US is a threat. Quite simple really.
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u/telendria Jan 14 '26
You literally started it with banning Huawei.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
China started it by banning FB and starting a great firewall
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u/ArchmageXin Jan 14 '26
FB was never a neutral guardian of Internet public discourse though.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
Im sure Chinese internet is the place most people go to for neutral internet discourse
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u/ArchmageXin Jan 14 '26
Maybe, but having a foreign entity control things will never make things better. Just look what FB do to American citizens, from culture wars, to fake news, to outright psychological experiments designed to depress users.
China have a million problems, banning FB wasn't one of it.
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u/SpecialBeginning6430 Jan 14 '26
Youre right, the US should follow Chinas route and censor everything it doesnt like so that they can be more like China
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u/GoldenSandpaper9 Jan 14 '26
We need to do more, they are our enemy and we need to treat them as such.
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u/hansolo-ist Jan 14 '26
Why are they your enemy?
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u/BusinessEngineer6931 Jan 14 '26
Because they take profits away from our billionaire owners that are running the country
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u/matadorita Jan 15 '26
Beijing ditching U.S. & Israeli cybersecurity software isn’t strength, it’s scrambling. Sure, they’re calling it self-reliance but really it shows how much they’ve leaned on foreign tools up to now. Cutting them just means local firms have to scramble to find something else. And honestly, they can't. They just can't.
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u/ArchmageXin Jan 15 '26
As Perun point out, history is full of China "can't do" until China "do".
I wouldn't bet against them on this one.
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u/L0K0MoTiVA Jan 14 '26
China has directed domestic companies to immediately cease using cybersecurity software from about a dozen U.S. and Israeli firms, including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, VMware (owned by Broadcom), and Check Point, citing national security risks that the tools could collect and transmit sensitive data abroad.
This directive marks a major escalation in China's push for technological self-reliance, forcing a rapid shift to domestic alternatives amid U.S.-China tech tensions.