Even a smoking gun won’t stop Huawei
Vodafone, and others, found vulnerabilities in Huawei’s products years ago, but price-point is a powerful blindfold
For more than a decade, executives, intelligence agencies and conspiracy theorists have been warning about the dangers of equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies. And for almost as long, Huawei has denied that its telecoms products pose any kind of security threat. The West has finally found its smoking gun. Yet it may not be enough to sway those on either side of the debate. As far back as 2009, Vodafone Group — one of the world’s most powerful and far-reaching telecom companies — found hidden back doors that could have given Huawei access to its fixed-line network in Italy, Bloomberg News’s Daniele Lepido reported pm Tuesday, citing security briefing documents from the London-based company. In a statement to Bloomberg News, Vodafone acknowledged that it had discovered such vulnerabilities. A key point in the documents is that even after Vodafone asked Huawei to remove back doors in its home internet routers in 2011, and received assurances that that they had been, further tests...
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