Security News > 2023 > September > Pot calls the kettle hack as China claims Uncle Sam did digital sneak peek first

The ongoing face-off between Washington and Beijing over technology and security issues has taken a new twist, with China accusing the US of hacking into the servers of Huawei in 2009 and conducting other cyber-attacks to steal critical data.

China's Ministry of State Security made the allegations in a posting on WeChat, claiming that in 2009 US intelligence services "Began to invade servers at Huawei headquarters and continued to monitor them."

The post goes on to claim that more recently, it was discovered that the US had carried out "Tens of thousands of malicious network attacks" on targets in China, including Northwestern Polytechnical University; that it had controlled tens of thousands of network devices; and stolen a large amount of high-value data.

The translated post claims that China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center recently managed to isolate a spyware sample it called "Second Date" when dealing with an incident at Northwestern Polytechnical University, and said it is a cyber espionage tool developed by the US National Security Agency that "Runs secretly on thousands of network devices in many countries around the world."

The "Second Date" incident was reported earlier this month by sites such as South China Morning Post, and was claimed to have been used in conjunction with various network device vulnerability attack tools from the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operations.

For its part, Huawei has always denied that it or its products pose a security threat, and researchers at the UK's National Cyber Security Centre charged with examining the firmware in Huawei's network kit found plenty of vulnerabilities due to shoddy coding, but nothing to suggest any backdoors had been planted.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/09/20/huawei_china_claims/