Secret Ways of Chinese Telecom Giant Huawei

The Secret Ways of Little Known Chinese Telecoms Giant Huawei - SPIEGEL ONLINE: " . . . The center is meant to banish all worries about the secretive company and its founder's (Chinese) military past, but not everyone is convinced. "That is probably supposed to sound reassuring," says Felix Linder, who dresses in black and goes by the name "FX" in industry circles. "But what good does it do German companies if the British intelligence service knows about Huawei's security vulnerabilities?" Linder is the head of Recurity Labs, a 10-person IT security firm based in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. "Intelligence agencies love security gaps," he adds, "just in case they need access at some point themselves." Lindner caused a global stir in July when he pointed out backdoors in Huawei Systems at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. At the time, attackers could easily crack the security coding of Huawei routers by entering standard, preset passwords, such as "supperman" with two p's. "I used to frequently criticize companies like Sun Microsystems," Lindner says dryly. "But comparatively speaking, Sun has seemed positively exemplary to me ever since I've gotten acquainted with Huawei. Its security reminds one of the level seen in the 1990s." In response, Huawei says that it cannot go into detail about security-related issues, but adds that it puts the highest value on quality. Still, Lindner doesn't believe that the unsecured backdoors in Huawei routers were programmed with evil intentions. Instead, he suggests that they are the result of sloppy work by young, underpaid engineers."


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