The NSA Hacked Huawei Long Ago
The US government has warned for years that products from China’s Huawei Technologies, the world’s biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, pose a national security risk for any countries that use them.
While some technology experts claimed that there was no solid evidence that Huawei and other Chinese brands employ any hidden and malicious privacy invasion. But more recently, Huawei devices have taken the centre stage in cyber security and several European countries have expressed major concerns.
Consider a scenario where you may use a Huawei telephone to have a conversation with a friend or a work colleague. It could be a discussion about a business deal, a programming project you're working on, or important business meetings. You could inadvertently pass along proprietary information to a foreign government without realising it.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting US government communications and information systems, which involves cryptanalysis and cryptography.
In 2014 documents were leaked from the NSA that revealed the US spy service was secretly stealing electronic data and other secrets by hacking Huawei.
The sensational spying operation, code-named Shotgiant, was undermined by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor now living in Russia who disclosed the top-secret hacking after stealing nearly 2 million NSA documents and releasing them to the press.
An investigation by Bloomberg journalists has revealed how the NSA was able to conduct its electronic spying operations around the world, penetrating Huawei’s routers and listening to the communications that passed through them.
A person familiar with the operation said spies working for the NSA Tailored Access Operations group, the secret hacking unit based near Baltimore-Washington International Airport, were able to get inside Huawei equipment because of an earlier hack of Cisco Systems routers.
In the early, 2000s, Huawei was sued by Cisco for stealing portions of Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System, or IOS, a family of software used in the company’s routers and switches. The case was settled quietly out of court.
While it's unlikely that Huawei and other Chinese brands would be entirely banned for the average consumer, multiple governments are looking to minimise and ban the use of Huawei technology in their telecommunications networks.
If Huawei were to acquire control over a large part of the telecommunications market in the western world, the Chinese intelligence community could potentially have access to user data. It could also intercept, or even shut down, all communications from those devices.
But in case the NSA already knows the details of Huawei's technology, they can most likely take steps to block or prevent any damaging malicious activity, and they don't need to be quite so worried about using it.
Bloomberg: Washington Times: ComputerWorld: Makeuseof.com:
You Might Also Read:
