NSA hacked and spied on huawei : Snowden

The US National Security Agency has secretly tapped into the networks of Chinese telecom and internet giant Huawei, the New York Times and Der Spiegel reported. Chinese telecoms equipment firm was targeted in 2009 via a program called “Shotgiant”, and also that the NSA spied on the Chinese government and other companies there.

The NSA accessed Huawei's email archive, communication between top company officials internal documents, and even the secret source code of individual Huawei products, read the reports, which were published on Saturday, based on documents provided by fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The operation had multiple goals. First, infiltrate a company that is the world's third-largest smartphone maker, and has become a major player in the global-networking market. Huawei makes both routers and other hardware that constitute the backbone of the Internet, as well as fiber-optic cables that connect Asia and Africa.

According to the reports, there’s no indication of whether the NSA found any Chinese backdoors in Huawei’s gear, but the U.S. agency was itself trying to find out how it could exploit the equipment to spy on end users. It was also stealing lists of customers and various other internal documents. Previous Snowden documents have shown how the NSA had backdoors for unspecified Huawei routers, with the codename HEADWATER, for use by the NSA and CIA.

Huawei kit may be off the menu in the U.S. and Australia, but it’s readily consumed elsewhere, providing stiff competition for the U.S. networking firm Cisco and Sweden’s Ericsson. The U.K. is a particularly keen customer – BT runs loads of Huawei equipment all the way into people’s living rooms.

Source : Aljazeera