The Pentagon intends to deal with Russian hackers

The Pentagon is working on compiling a list of software vendors, which should help to avoid the acquisition of Russian and Chinese.

The U.S. Department of defense is working on a “black list” of suppliers that uses the software, which is based on program code of the Russian and Chinese origin, told the official representative of the procurement division of the Ministry of defense of the United States, writes Reuters.

According to Deputy Minister of defense for procurement Helen Lord, a Pentagon for six months working on establishing a list of vendors of software, which should help the Department staff and industry partners to avoid purchasing Russian and Chinese.

“We want to be sure that we don’t buy software from a Russian or Chinese origin, for example, and quite often it’s hard to tell at first glance due to holding companies”, – she told reporters .

The Lord said that the Pentagon worked closely with the intelligence community, adding that they have identified some companies that do not act in accordance with their standards of protection. However, the Deputy Minister provided no details about the list.

This statement was made in anticipation of a probable passage in Congress of the bill on the spending of the Pentagon. The bill contains provisions that would force technology companies to disclose whether countries such as China and Russia, the opportunity to study the source codes of the software sold to the US military.

The legislation was developed after a study by Reuters showed that the developers of the software has allowed the Russian defense Agency to look for vulnerabilities in software used by some agencies of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon and intelligence services.

Lord added that a new report about the chain of military procurement in the United States show that the Pentagon depends on foreign suppliers of components to some military equipment, including Chinese firms.

Recall, the Ministry of defense this week raskryl details about series of cyber-attacks, which, according to officials, allowed hackers working for the Russian government to access some of the industrial systems used to control infrastructure, including at least one generator of electricity.