Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China.
Wired reports the chips weren't only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a "back-door" and could have been remotely shut down at any time.
If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it's friend or foe.
Apparently foreign microchips are often cheaper, but there are legal issues for defense contractors when going outside of the U.S. for source items.
Another problem are possible "trojan-horse" circuits that can be built into the chip, almost impossible to detect - especially without the original plans for comparison.
Read more HERE
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