oh yes, it does. Good catch. False-Flagging your actions as commercially motivated doesn’t strike me as a hard to construct alibi, either. Certainly not beyond the scope of sophisticated, state aligned actors, except maybe the north-Koreans, that guardians of peace Spiel was entertaining tho.

This awakens memories of GCHQ attacks on Belgian(?) telecom providers; they really are inherent gold mines for dragnet surveillance, stealing database, offensive cyberattacks and probably lots more. There’s a reason Huawei is subsidized for offering cheap 5g infrastructure to international clients, it’s a real nice thing to have backdoors to. Not saying the west is much better in this regard, Cisco has been more than compliant in similar shenanigans just to name one.

“Using weird protocols” for C&C is old hat for hackers tbh. Well over a decade ago after reading an RFC I switched all my backdoors to use SCTP - a protocol many of my peers had never fucking heard of - and found it evaded a shit tonne of IDS/firewall products.