Highlights of the article:
- The Chinese government has “pervasive access” to some 80 percent of the world’s communications, giving it the ability to undertake remote industrial espionage and even sabotage electronically of critical infrastructures in the United States and in other industrialized countries.
- The Chinese government and its People’s Liberation Army are acquiring the access through two Chinese companies, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd and ZTE Corporation, telecommunications experts have told WND.
- With this access, the sources say, the Chinese are working on the other 20 percent. The two companies give the Chinese remote electronic “backdoor” access through the equipment they have installed in telecommunications networks in 140 countries. The Chinese companies service 45 of the world’s 50 largest telecom operators.
- As a consequence, sources say that any information traversing “any” Huawei equipped network isn’t safe unless it has military encryption. One source warned, “even then, there is no doubt that the Chinese are working very hard to decipher anything encrypted that they intercept.”
- “Any U.S. company that deals with a Mexican company or any foreign company in a country where Huawei has installed network equipment is potentially entirely compromised,” the source said.
- British Telecom apparently is a major user of Huawei equipment in its core networks and one of the biggest allied countries to the U.S. with numerous electronic business exchanges occurring on a daily basis among companies.
- The electronic intrusions by the Chinese are done remotely through the use of the commercial networks set up by Huawei and ZTE that they have established in numerous countries.
- “how do you differentiate between clever government business and state-sponsored cyber-espionage?” the WND source asked. “I guess when you are dealing with the Chinese and their stated military aim is global cyber superiority, then it just flows like night to day,” source said.
- Having Huawei install the systems in Peru and Mexico, the source said, provides a “perfect cover” for using the network equipment to inject viruses and bypass anti-virus protection, firewalls and other traditional security mechanisms.
- He added that any U.S. company that deals with foreign countries that have incorporated Huawei and ZTE technology into their national telecom systems is in serious jeopardy of industrial espionage without knowing it. The problem is especially serious, he said, in this period of globalization in which companies deal routinely on a daily basis in the exchange of sensitive, proprietary information, potentially jeopardizing any protection of intellectual properties.
- “Successful penetration of a supply chain such as that for the telecommunications industry has the potential to cause the catastrophic failure of systems and networks supporting critical infrastructure for national security or public safety,” the report said.
- “Potential effects include providing an adversary with capabilities to gain covert access and monitoring of sensitive systems, to degrade a system’s mission effectiveness, or to insert false information or instructions that could cause premature failure or complete remote control or destruction of the targeted system.”
- While Huawei has denied to WND that it has capabilities that are of concern to the House Intelligence Committee, sources point to a particular technology that Huawei has developed called Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI, which gives it and ZTE capabilities that pose potential threats to U.S. security. While Huawei’s presentation of its DPI capability was meant to show how it protected Huawei-equipped networks by detecting malicious code, WND sources say that the very same technology “can be very effectively used to conduct widespread industrial espionage and breach national telecommunications security.”
- Sources add that the Chinese government, through the company’s “electronic backdoor” of telecommunications networks, has the ability to exploit networks to steal technology and trade secrets, or even to sabotage electronic devices.
- With this capability, China would be in a position to sabotage critical U.S. weapons systems and sensitive cyber sites, all of which could include intelligence or systems used by defense contractors doing work on behalf of the Department of Defense or the U.S. intelligence community.
- The source referred to Huawei’s ability through its DPI technology for “data mirroring,” which was referred to in its presentation. The WND source said this was just “plain old interception.”
- Experts say DPI generally is a restricted technology because it is so pervasive. It operates at what experts call “line speeds” of up to multiples of 10 gigabytes per second and can “read” every packet in a data stream. “Once you have access to every piece of data in a data stream,” the WND source said, “you can do literally anything with it. You can copy it, you can restrict it, you can control it – all at line speed – without any degradation of the signal.
- “The challenge really is dealing with the volume of traffic in high speed links, but with advanced software, folks managing DPI appliances in networks have the capability of using advanced techniques such as protocol identification to strip out the stuff they want,” the source added. “When I say ‘strip out,’ in the Chinese sense I mean intercept and copy.” Huawei’s DPI presentation also referred to detecting and “block[ing] illegal applications” and referred to “VPNs,” or Very Private Networks, as an example. “And what is ‘blocking of illegal applications’ if it is not data interception, which has to occur in order to identify the traffic, and censorship,” the source added.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/chinese-have-pervasive-access-to-80-of-worlds-telecoms/
