In the last couple of years, we’ve come to the harsh truth that the National Security Agency of the United States has been vigurously spying on not only companies around the world, but its own people. Edward Snowden blew the lid off the whole thing last year when he leaked documents showing how the NSA collected masses of phone data and even wormed they way in to servers around the world to spy on our email and more. Something that might not be as surprising to us, is that the NSA breached Huawei’s servers in order to keep an eye on those that use Huawei products to communicate. Of course, this is pretty ironic as the US had constantly accused Huawei and ZTE of being used by China to spy on the US, and all along the NSA has been using Huawei for the same purpose.
The New York Times is reporting that leaked documents from Mr Snowden point to the NSA breaching Huawei’s servers at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. According to documents leaked by Snowden, the project was referred to as operation “Shotgiant” and was devised in order to be able to exploit products that use Huawei’s infrastructure and such in order to communicate. The documents date back to 2010 and state that their original intention was to find any links to the People’s Liberation Army, but then went much further than that. In the documents, the NSA states “Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products. We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products, to gain access to networks of interest”
This is a hardly surprising move by the NSA, but still interesting to see, after all the US government had been making life difficult for Huawei by accusing them of the very same thing. It’s hard to say which side of the coin I personally land on this one, on one hand it’s wrong that the NSA is breaking into such servers, but on another it’d be foolish to ignore the massive threat cyber-espionage from the Chinese. Hacking groups in China – whether funded and put together by the Government or not – can be incredibly dangerous and cause American companies serious problems, not to mention the threat they pose to National Security.
You can read more at the NY Times below, and don’t forget to reach out and let us know how you feel about this one in the comments below and over on Google+!