NSA Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat

US officials long blocked the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei from business deals for its supposed link with the Chinese military. “But even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors – directly into Huawei’s networks,” report David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth for the New York Times. According to documents released by a former contract worker, the NSA accessed servers and “obtained information about the workings of the giant routers and complex digital switches that Huawei boasts connect a third of the world’s population, and monitored communications of the company’s top executives.” A rationale from the NSA was that many target suspects communicated over Huawei equipment, including 20 Chinese military hacking groups, but another goal was potential offensive cyberoperations. The United States insists that it does not enter foreign networks for purposes of industrial espionage. Some US analysts suspect that Huawei is simply a front for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army – with the sole purpose of collecting data from others, but no proof has been presented. The leaked NSA document is silent on the question – YaleGlobal