Huawei stole our tech and created a 'backdoor' to spy on Pakistan, claims IT biz | Hacker News Reader

Huawei stole our tech and created a 'backdoor' to spy on Pakistan, claims IT biz

theregister.com

195 pointsDotnaught55 comments

Huawei is following their playbook from the Nortel days. Why would anyone expect them to stop doing what brought them to success?

Malicious Life made a great 3 episode podcast series on that.

https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-china...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Nortel

Nortel had deeper issues than some industrial espionage to deal with: accounting fraud.

That scared the market and potential investors in a spectacular fashion.

Right, they talk about too and pretty much everyone in it agrees that Nortels leadership were the ones mainly responsible for their downfall.

I along with my team was part of this project, the Lahore SafeCity project, working closely with BES to deliver the required technology. I had a lead role in most of the projects and was familiar with all of their workings to a good extent.

I clearly remember going to give a demo of one the systems and at the end of it the British Consultant belonging to ARUP consulting firm told the Huawei software team in a passing remark "lets meet later and i`ll teach you guys about version control". Thats how I came to realize that the Huawei team may have hardware expertise, but the people they had working at SafeCity Lahore were not very competent at software.

Midway through our engagement some members of the Punjab Police (government) informed us that the Huawei folks were taking our documentation for various projects and shopping around for cheaper quotes. This is where things started going really sour.

Aside from this we encountered many other hurdles from Day 1 and the overall process was very unpleasant to say the least.

So how is it different from the usual behaviour of any large corporation?

Ha! Is this news to them? Of course they would not honor a contract they can ignore. You can put as many contracts and multiple factors and audit trails as you want, if they want your trade secrets and you do a venture with them, I guess be happy for the short term money, but your IP will be gone.

I think this about Intel using TSMC as a foundry - why TSMC want to help their biggest competitor become more competitive and learn from your business dealings I don’t know…

Who do you think is learning from who in this situation?

Intel from TSMC?

the thing that really pisses me as a paki is not the fact that we are so regularly tracked, but that despite all that tracking... there is zero upside

all those cameras and still crime is not stopped. By all means track dissidents, at this stage I've stopped even caring, but can you please nab car thieves too?

all that tracking via our CNIC (id card numbers)... and still process are so slow and inefficient, you can track my every phone call and sms but can't ensure I get access to easy credit?

like jeez, I know I'm being rammed regardless, atleast buy me dinner

its to track "capable" people with destabilizing capacity not lowest criminal scum, too expensive

The Uyghurs are being tracked for when they come back to CHina.

"We resell stuff, our customer found our supplier and bought the stuff directly and were upset about it"

Ordinarily wouldn't want to join the China brigade but its a normal problem.

If it's on a phone and you can't figure out how to compile it then it will be used to screw you.

So this company claims they have developed and installed backdoors for Huawei and didn't get paid. Am I reading the same article?

Not backdoors, more like replicated backups. From the article:

""Backdoor" may not be the right term, though it's difficult to be certain without knowing the details of the system's technical architecture. In the complaint, the term is used to describe a duplicate of the PSCA's DES running on servers based in a Huawei facility in Suzhou, China. Whether that copy arises from a covert remote access capability or an overt replication option under indifferent or permissive security policy isn't clear."

> According to the complaint, authorities in Pakistan invited various companies to submit proposals, including Motorola, Nokia, and Huawei

This sounds surprising, are Motorola and Nokia really in the police IT systems business? The common factor among the 3 companies seems to be that they make mobile phone related things.

Motorola sold their phone business to Google, Nokia sold there’s to Microsoft, Nokia then sold their name to a Chinese phone company and are just involved in telecommunication equipment these days, so is Motorola it seems.

Nokia brand for phones is sold to HMD Global which is owned by former Nokia employees.

Yep, I meant mobile phone network infra, all 3 companies are in that business afaik. And the article talks about some general police IT infra project.

Motorola originally made car radios, and police radio systems were their biggest business for many years.

Not surprising at all, Motorola still is a market leader for EMS/Police Radios.

At least Motorola is a vendor for German police wireless network TETRA: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio#Infr...

They provide the UK police radio system too [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airwave_Solutions

With Huawei behaving this way can we trust our electronic devices made in China? Are there devices purely made in South Korea or Taiwan?

(Note I don’t say this with some kind of anti-China sentiment, I’m pretty sure I’d be worried about the NSA back-dooring everything too if it was made in the US).

This is different. Consultancy is about trying to sell for the lowest bid by stealing as many partners tech as you can

NSA is backdooring stuff that’s not even being manufactured in the US. The way it works in US, with “national security letters” and gag orders, means no US-based company can realistically refuse it.

That's exactly why I buy Huawei devices. USA govt could see me as the enemy one day for all I know. But the Chinese have no reason on earth to take interest in me. Seems the safer risk.

Lol.

>With Huawei behaving this way can we trust our electronic devices made in China?

In industry this is called a supply chain attack, and the answer has been a resounding "no, of course we can't trust those devices" for years and years.

Why do they need backdoors to spy on Pakistan, when they have the "front door?"

Pakistan's biggest cellphone provider is China Mobile

Pakistan and China have been getting progressively closer/interrelated, and more antagonistic to India. I suppose it could be infrastructure. China loves to spy on allies/their own.

China is thorough, and Pakistan is of great interest to them.

> Pakistan's biggest cellphone provider is China Mobile

pakistan's largest cell service provider is Mobilink, owned by an Egyptian company "Orascom", which in turn was bought by dutch based "Veon"

It worth checking numbers again. I felt that Zong has passed the Mobilink by subscriber numbers few years ago, especially with their internet offers as of late.

I've a friend who works in (a seperates) telecom company, I get regular active user rankings from him, if the leader board had changed i would have known ;p

These numbers, which are dated June 2021, have Zong in third place with 21.96% of the market: https://pta.gov.pk/en/telecom-indicators/7

>Huawei also began to use one of BES’s software systems to establish a 'backdoor' from China into Pakistan that allowed Huawei to collect and view data important to Pakistan’s national security and other private, personal data on Pakistani citizens."

Apart from propaganda value of trying to drive wedge between PRC and Pakistan, is this suite suggesting Huawei... didn't have capability to collect info prior to 2017? Also how does a California based company expect to extract any payment from an US sanctioned Huawei, not much leverage now that they are forced to de-americanize. Or that US labelled telecom tech dual-use, and stealing military tech is totally fair game. Huawei had to settle with CISCO to enter US market, but AVIC isn't worried over using stolen F35 plans on J20. Seems like a very futile suit apart from geopolitcal factors.

From the article:

So zero evidence of a backdoor.

> Apart from propaganda value of trying to drive wedge between PRC and Pakistan. ... Seems like a very futile suit apart from geopolitcal factors.

That's exactly how it reads for me as well.

This sounds vaguely familiar...

Allegedly.

Cries into poutine

That’s so interesting, China has been doing a great job of angering neighbors recently, except they tried to make friends with Pakistan to gain support against their land grabs against India. Sucks for them they got caught.

Given the current state of affairs it’s hard not to assume this is just another piece of anti-Huawei propaganda.

Couldn’t agree more. The only backdoors ever found in Huawei equipment were those installed by the NSA themselves.

[1] ”… 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.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-c...

[2] “…an even bigger concern is that with the growing ubiquity of Huawei products, the NSA's own surveillance network could grow dark in areas where the equipment is used.

For that reason, as the latest Snowden revelations showed last week, the spy agency reportedly hacked Huawei as part of an operation launched in 2007. The plan involved stealing source code for some of Huawei's products in the hope of finding vulnerabilities. Such security holes could allow the NSA to exploit the products and spy on traffic in countries where Huawei equipment is used -- such as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, and Cuba.”

https://www.wired.com/2014/03/how-huawei-became-nsa-nightmar...

It can be true and propaganda simultaneously.

It could, but experience shows it’s pretty much all FUD - bad stuff about China that is true doesn’t need propaganda, because it’s being picked up by everyone anyway. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what happens with US-based companies, where the backdoors have been actually found, not just alleged, yet many people still consider them more secure than non-US counterparts.

The claims about huawei in the west were never substantiated. Are these?

Which claims? They have quite a rep sheet!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei

Most of that page describes US state propaganda aimed at Huawei, not actual wrongdoings by Huawei.

Per your own link (Espionage and security concerns section), there are dozens of "expressions of concern" and similar, but no one has ever found the backdoor that is apparently totally definately there...

Seems fitting. With Pakistan backing the Taliban I hooe that this information is an leaked and made public.

A nuclear power with a chatotic-evil government is backing religious extremists who are taking over Afghanistan, again and are violently forcing extremist wahhabi on the people.

Imagine what will happen when the taliban takes over Pakistan.

The more leaks the better.

How is such a vitriolic comment allowed on HackerNews?

Nuance is difficult to attain when talking about people living 12 timezones away

Did they make a claim that is not true?

> Imagine what will happen when the taliban takes over Pakistan.

Will anyone know?

Only fours days ago, a wee 8 year-old child was formally charged with blasphemy - which carries the death sentence.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/09/e...

> Will anyone know?

yes, because the sect that is responsible for all the blasphemy accusations (like the one you linked) is separate from the sect that the Taliban follow, sparks will fly between the groups, and they have a significant numbers advantage in pakistan.

in other words, the taliban can't capture pakistan because a different sect already has ;p

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