Companies the US has said are linked to the Chinese military are a bigger part of the US economy than I thought, according to a new report. One-third of the US supply chain relies on firms that the Pentagon categorizes as “Chinese military companies,” according to a report published this week by Boston-based cybersecurity firm BitSight Technologies Inc. The number surprised me, especially given that US officials have been warning about the dangers of Chinese-made telecommunications equipment and other IT infrastructure for at least a decade. The risks range from espionage to the possibility of Beijing shutting down critical systems. A big part of BitSight’s sales pitch is that it examines companies’ publicly-facing internet properties like websites and scans for any potential risks using its own network of monitoring tools deployed around the internet. Cybersecurity ratings firms like BitSight often base their reports on their own impressions, and can’t check out the technology behind the scenes at the firms they’re looking into. In this case, BitSight told me it took a sample of 225,000 American companies whose internet-facing infrastructure it was able to map using its sensors. Of them, BitSight identified more than 20,000 firms that use equipment or services from eight entities that the Defense Department identifies as Chinese military companies, including China Telecom Corp., China Unicom Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Full opinion : Nearly one third of U.S. tech companies including its defense companies rely on ‘Chinese Military Companies’ for parts.