Article from 2014 Pic caption
Staff and visitors walk pass the lobby at the Huawei office in Wuhan, China.
Snowden, Huawei, Wuhan
THE NSA'S GLOBAL spy operation may seem unstoppable, but there's at least one target that has proven to be a formidable obstacle: the Chinese communications technology firm Huawei, whose growth could threaten the agency's much-publicized digital spying powers.
An unfamiliar name to American consumers, Huawei produces products that are swiftly being installed in the internet backbone in many regions of the world, displacing some of the western-built equipment that the NSA knows – and presumably knows how to exploit – so well.
That obstacle is growing bigger each year as routers and other networking equipment made by Huawei Technologies and its offshoot, Huawei Marine Networks, become more ubiquitous. The NSA and other U.S. agencies have long been concerned that the Chinese government or military – Huawei's founder is a former officer in the People's Liberation Army – may have installed backdoors in Huawei equipment, enabling it for surveillance. But an even bigger concern is that with the growing ubiquity of Huawei products, the NSA's own surveillance network could grow dark in areas where the equipment is used.
For that reason, as the latest Snowden revelations showed last week, the spy agency reportedly hacked Huawei as part of an operation launched in 2007. The plan involved stealing source code for some of Huawei's products in the hope of finding vulnerabilities. Such security holes could allow the NSA to exploit the products and spy on traffic in countries where Huawei equipment is used – such as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, and Cuba.
“Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” an internal NSA document obtained by Snowden noted in 2010, according to the New York Times. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products … to gain access to networks of interest” around the world.
The spies might also have been seeking access to Huawei routers through management consoles operated by Huawei support staff, giving them privileged access to customer systems.
Just how widely used are Huawei products?
The concerns about Chinese government influence over Huawei have kept the company's products out of the North American market for the most part, as well as some other western markets. But because of price-cutting, Huawei has become popular in parts of Latin America and the Middle East and is currently the leader in the world's $13-billion-a-year market for fiber optical networking equipment, having surpassed Alcatel-Lucent and other companies.
The optical market includes all networking equipment, minus the cables, used for communicating over land-based optic and ethernet networks – this includes switches, repeaters that amplify the signal strength on long-haul transmissions, and landing-station equipment installed where undersea cables come ashore.
The company pulled in about $3 billion last year in that market, primarily in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, according to technology research firm IDC.
Even more important, Huawei is also the fourth-largest provider of backbone routers, according to IDC, after Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, and Juniper Networks.
Huawei produces a variety of routers for home and small businesses and for connecting cell phone sites on mobile networks. The overall router market in 2013 was about $14 billion. Cisco grabbed about 60 percent of that market share, while Huawei had $1.3 billion last year. That's just 10 percent of the total market, but the company's growth in this area has been steady. In 2011, the company sold about 35,000 routers worldwide. That increased to 49,000 in 2012 and 54,000 last year.
The biggest growth in router revenue, however, has come primarily from its sale of 400G routers used for the internet backbone.
"They're making inroads into what Cisco and Juniper had, [which was] 97 percent of that market up until three years ago," says Nav Chander, research manager for telecom business services and associated carrier network infrastructure for IDC's Worldwide Telecom Division. "Huawei is displacing Cisco and Juniper in other regions outside of the U.S."
Customers that signed router contracts with Huawei last year for packages that contained 400G routers include top telecoms in a number of countries, including Swisscom in Switzerland and DNA in Finland, Saudi Telecom Company and MTN Group's operations in Africa and the Middle East, Telkom in South Africa, America Movil in Ecuador and Brazil, Telefonica's operations in Brazil, and Entel in Chile.
Read more https://www.wired.com/2014/03/how-huawei-became-nsa-nightmare/