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Australian Intelligence Knows Huawei Was Used in Espionage, Report Says (axios.com)
According to a report in The Australian, Australia received intelligence reports that Huawei personnel provided Chinese spies passwords to hack a "foreign network." From a report: Though there are many broad allegations that telecommunications equipment providers Huawei and ZTE sabotage products so that spies can conduct espionage, the public is largely in the dark about how and if the nation has ever used that capacity. The Australian report claims: "Chinese espionage services used telecommunications giant Huawei's staff to get access codes to infiltrate a foreign network." The attack took place within the last two years.
Of Chinese spies are even halfway doing their job, they'll be taking advantage of the fact that so many countries use so much gear made in China. They should be fired and may be executed if they aren't doing this.
If one stops to think about the idea, it makes sense for a plutocracy that believes in a surveillance state to build spyware into the products its communications industry exports. If I were a ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party, I would definitely be advocating for this to further my agenda because so many western countries are scrambling for telecommunications hardware being made by the two biggest Chinese networking gear manufacturers Huawei and ZTE. It's simple really: make it monetarily attractive to go with something other than Cisco while secretly incorporating spyware and backdoors into routing and switching products while delaying, obstructing, and obfuscating. Unlike a lot of theories and accusations, this one isn't of the tin foil variety. The Chinese Communist Party is actually being commendably (sic) creative about the entire affair. They know that in basic capitalist economies, people look for the least expensive option to maximize the most amount of profit. So they may subsidize ZTE and Huawei allowing the two behemoths to sell their networking gear at (maybe?) less than cost if they include backdoors. Western government and industry gobbles this cheaper alternative up and the Chinese plutocracy can then just siphon off government, trade, and industry secrets.