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omoc writes:
"From the SPON article:
"The American government conducted a major intelligence offensive against China, with targets including the Chinese government and networking company Huawei, according to documents from former NSA worker Edward Snowden that have been viewed by SPIEGEL. Among the American intelligence service's targets were former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the Chinese Trade Ministry, banks, as well as telecommunications companies. But the NSA made a special effort to target Huawei.
According to a top secret NSA presentation, NSA workers not only succeeded in accessing the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huwaei products."
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NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Huawei
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There is a 20% chance of tomorrow.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sigterm on Sunday March 23 2014, @07:09PM
>it makes you wonder if they found back doors in the source code and then
>told the government not to buy it... Of course that's just speculation,
>and they could have put the back doors in and then said don't use it now
>it's not safe.... But I'm just wondering if there's a link between the
>hacking and the purchasing ban?
You just highlighted what is possibly the most important question raised by this leak: what, if anything, did they find? The answer to that question is highly relevant for establishing the NSA's motives for getting involved in industrial espionage in the first place.
These are the facts:
a) We know the NSA spied on Huawei, and since they reportedly made "special efforts" to target them, it stands to reason that they should have obtained secret documents and source code.
b) We know the US government decided to outright ban Huawei equipment, but we don't really know why. There have been no announcements from the NSA about them having confirmed the existence of backdoors in Huawei gear, so the claims about security issues remain unsubstantiated.
That leaves 3 possibilities:
1) The NSA made "special efforts" to target Huawei, but obtained nothing of interest. That would indicate lack of competence and ability on NSA's part.
2) The NSA managed to get their hands on lots of information, but found no major security vulnerabilities or intentional backdoors in any Huawei equipment. That would make the US government's decision not to purchase Huawei gear a misguided (not to mention treaty-violating) attempt at protectionism.
3) The NSA obtained information and found vulnerabilities/backdoors, but decided against informing the public at large in order to exploit these vulnerabilities themselves. They may or may not have informed government officials. That would mean the NSA values their ability to spy on everyone so highly that they're willing to jeopardize the interests of American businesses and individuals in order to retain and increase that ability.
Alternative 2) is the most unlikely of the three, as I'm sure anyone who's ever performed a security audit of Huawei equipment can vouch for. For everyone else, a quick search for "huawei" at www.cvedetails.com (or a Google search for "huawei security vulnerabilities" for that matter) should prove an enlightening experience.
That leaves either 1) or 3), and those scenarios imply that the NSA is unable or unwilling to protect the assets the organization was in fact founded to protect.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Adrian Harvey on Sunday March 23 2014, @08:01PM
I'm not sure that those are the only possibilities - we could also have the scenarios
4) The NSA broke in, got their hands on information, found some backdoors, and decided not to inform the public because it would reveal their "special efforts" and/or their intelligence sources that had made this possible. However they did inform their government which stopped purchasing the kit, and informed the public that it had concerns, but not why or what. [this is, perhaps, the most positive possible interpretation]
5) Some part of the government decided to ban Huawei for political reasons (say, domestic protectionism) and the NSA is sent to look for some dirt to graease the wheels on the decision. These were kept secret from the public to prevent embarrassment.
6) The events were simply correlated, with no causation.
My chief worry is that there was actually a real known 0-day type exploit that stopped the government from buying them. I had formerly assumed that it was mostly political games with China or an 'if we. can't instect the source we can't be sure' problem rather than a real, known problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @08:57PM
If anything of interest would have been found, it would have been documented in that very presentation/documents that were leaked. So we can safely assume, nothing of interest was found.
Another theory is, if they invaded Chinese network gear on this level it is not too far fetched to imagine that "Chinese hacker attacks" may originate from the NSA as well. They can use this to further discredit Huawei or even plant backdoors in their products, the potential for false flag operations is tremendous.