In the past we have seen how to the US government has warned not to trust companies like Huawei or ZTE for allegedly designing spyphones for the Chinese government. Naturally both companies have denied these allegations and in the latest Snowden leak, it seems a little ironic because it has been revealed that the NSA has been spying on Huawei themselves.
This is according to a recently released report on Sunday which claims that the NSA has been snooping on Huawei and has even managed to obtain the source code for individual Huawei branded products, thus potentially allowing them to spy on other nations which uses Huawei’s hardware.
In fact this would be extremely possible because as it stands, Huawei is the second larger manufacturer of networking equipment which is used to connect about a third of the world’s population. How the NSA began its snooping was allegedly back in 2009 when they intercepted an email by Huawei’s Chairwoman, Sun Yafang and CEO Red Zhengfei.
This allowed the NSA to gain confidential information about the company, even the company’s sealed headquarters located in Shenzhen. According to the Snowden report, the NSA was ready to wage offensive cyber operations against Huawei if they were told to do so by the President himself.
According to John Suffolk, global cyber security officer at Huawei, “If the actions in the report are true, Huawei condemns such activities that invaded and infiltrated into our internal corporate network and monitored our communications.”