Why attack people when you can exploit their data to make money. This is some growth "hacking" to make a list of sales leads.
It almost makes me wonder if there's a component in the hardware or software that's shared with other devices manufactured in China that are better attack vectors and they just tossed it into this one because, hey, it works.
That backdoor, if it reports to a university, is probably put there to facilitate a study/diploma/phd or something like that.