Leaked documents suggest Cisco earned $67m a year from Israeli military intelligence

Cisco accrued roughly $67 million per year over three years from work with Israeli military intelligence, according to a trove of confidential internal documents obtained by The Guardian and published this week.

The documents came from Cisco staff upset with the company's work with Israeli military units. They surface amid a wider reckoning over big tech contracts with Israeli government agencies, and they add a commercial dimension to a story that has so far centered mostly on cloud vendors.

What do the leaked files actually contain?

The Guardian's reporting rests on several concrete claims:

• Cisco earned an estimated $67 million per year across three years from Israeli military intelligence work.
• Splunk, the observability and security firm Cisco completed its acquisition of in March 2024, had pitched to participate in Project Nimbus, the program supplying cloud services to Israeli government agencies.
• Cisco mobilized multiple internal teams over several months to fix bugs affecting critical network infrastructure used by Israeli intelligence.
• Internal documents described the account as "critical."

Cisco worked with Israeli agencies long before military operations in Gaza began following the October 2023 Hamas attacks. The new material concerns what happened after.

According to the report, Cisco rushed to repair its relationship with Israeli intelligence forces after multihour outages caused by its equipment. The repairs mattered because the outages had supposedly endangered agencies' access to military data. The report places this work against the backdrop of an estimated 70,000 largely civilian deaths in Gaza.

System updates carried out during the war supposedly "deeply impact[ed] customer sentiment," internal documents state, as repeated outages "severely impacted critical operations." Among the intelligence agencies Cisco sent staff to was a secretive Israeli military unit responsible for shifting critical infrastructure underground.

The leaks reportedly stated Cisco's desire to restore "customer confidence" and reverse "negative sentiment." One internal presentation went as far as to describe the damage control effort as a "customer success story."

The gap between that framing and the circumstances surrounding it is the story's sharpest edge. Vendor language of customer success sits uneasily beside a war that has drawn regulatory and reputational scrutiny toward technology suppliers across the sector.

What does this change for Cisco beyond the contracts?

The reputational exposure is not hypothetical. The Guardian's report follows a finding by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) of "reasonable cause" that Cisco subjected Muslim and Middle Eastern employees to a hostile work environment.

Staff complained that, in the wake of the October attacks by Hamas, repeated posts containing racist and Islamophobic content appeared on internal company messaging platforms. Some posts were alleged to have celebrated the deaths of civilians. Posts by staff members who raised concerns in an open letter regarding Cisco's sales to the Israeli government were allegedly removed from the platform, while individuals who spoke out were subjected to targeted posts.

Cisco disagreed with the EEOC's findings. The company told The Guardian it remained committed to being an equal opportunity employer.

The company has not, according to the reporting, publicly addressed the substance of the leaked contract figures or the outage repair effort. The Guardian's material gives no indication that Cisco intends to withdraw from the Israeli government accounts, and Project Nimbus remains active as a procurement vehicle for Israeli agencies, meaning the commercial and political pressures documented in the leaks are likely to persist rather than resolve.

For vendors across the telecom and enterprise networking sector, the episode underlines a growing operational reality: government and defense contracts once treated as routine revenue now carry documented internal dissent, employment litigation risk and press exposure. Cisco's $67 million-a-year account may be modest against its total business, but the cost of defending it is proving considerably harder to contain.