India’s decision on Huawei, ZTE may have been shaped by “espionage acts” globally

In 2019, Dutch newspaper Volkskrant said in a report that Huawei had a hidden “backdoor” on the network of the Netherlands’ largest mobile network, KPN.

This backdoor allegedly allowed Huawei to gain unlimited access to call records and customer data, including conversations by government ministers, experts who closely tracked the Netherlands episode have alleged.

In October 2020, KPN chose Swedish telecom firm Ericsson over Huawei for its core 5G network.

KPN’s decision came close on the heels of the United States designating Huawei and ZTE as national security threats that year in June.

American cybersecurity firm Mandiant has said that Beijing has engaged in extensive cyber espionage against both friends and adversaries based on fibre optic communications infrastructure.

Earlier, in January 2018, technicians at the African Union (AU) headquarters building in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) discovered that a backdoor allowed the transfer of data from computers in the building to servers in Shanghai for five years, according to a report in French newspaper Le Monde. Beijing had constructed the building.

The AU and China have previously denied the report

In August 2020, a report from the Australian government and Papua New Guinea’s National Cyber Security Centre noted that the latter’s National Data Centre, built by Huawei in 2018, is marred by various cybersecurity issues, which has led to secret government files being stolen.

According to the assessment by the US intelligence community published last month, China’s cyber espionage operations have included compromising telecommunications firms, providers of managed services and broadly used software, and other targets potentially rich in follow-on opportunities for intelligence collection, attack, or influence operations.

“We assess that China presents a prolific and effective cyber-espionage threat, possesses substantial cyber-attack capabilities, and presents a growing influence threat. China’s cyber pursuits and proliferation of related technologies increase the threats of cyberattacks against the US homeland, suppression of US web content that Beijing views as threatening to its internal ideological control, and the expansion of technology-driven authoritarianism around the world,” according to the US report.