Vodafone denied discovering an alarming vulnerability in Huawei’s telecom equipment following a Bloomberg report describing such a turn of events earlier today.
Sources originally claimed Vodafone discovered a number of issues with protections integrated into Huawei’s solutions, concluding the Chinese firm was able to access certain routers used in Italy. The telecom giant did not outright deny every single allegation made in the story but said all of the concerns detailed in the report date back to 2011 and 2012. As a result of that state of affairs, all of them have been adequately addressed many years ago and present a non-issue today, Vodafone said.
Additionally, none of the issues identified by the sources allowed Huawei unauthorized access to Italian homes and there’s no evidence the Shenzen-based firm ever attempted abusing the previously discovered development oversights, according to Vodafone.
Critics of Huawei often targeted vulnerabilities in the company’s equipment and software many times in the past, though the Chinese company repeatedly argued its solutions are no more insecure than those from its rivals.
Vodafone and many other wireless carriers on the Old Continent are now under American scrutiny regarding their 5G plans; the United States government is still trying to pressure its allies into dropping Huawei-made technologies, citing security risks.
While the likes of Germany and the United Kingdom were already close to curbing Huawei’s telecom business, the aggressive manner wherein the U.S. approached lobbying against the firm now appears to be backfiring to a degree, particularly in Berlin’s case.
The anti-Huawei argument in the West largely comes down to the fact that the Chinese government has tremendous power to compel any domestic company to do its bidding. Given Huawei’s status of the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications solutions, the communist administration in Beijing certainly has plenty of reasons to want to snoop through the company’s data, whether in real time or after the fact.
As much as Huawei is resisting the notion of being susceptible to Chinese influence, a number of existing and publicly accessible laws in the country are indicative of the opposite being the case. The U.S. deems that reason enough to continue blocking the firm’s wireless business on its soil but the fact that its allies aren’t following suit is now causing plenty of friction in the West.
Ultimately, the likeliest scenario is that this status quo continues for the foreseeable future; the U.S. has no intention of allowing Huawei to play a role in its 5G plans but European nations appear ready to give it a chance to do so, particularly in regards to non-core network components. As a result, the U.S. is now preparing a plan B while continuing to threaten with cutting off some intelligence avenues if its allies aren’t willing to play ball.
Australia and New Zealand are still the only companies that outright denied Huawei’s wireless ambitions following the U.S., whereas Japan, Canada, Germany, and the Czech Republic previously signaled they’re exploring similar options but are yet to pull the trigger on any of them.