Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% Of Telecoms

The Chinese government reportedly has "pervasive access" to some 80 percent of the world's communications, thanks to backdoors it has ordered to be installed in devices made by Huawei and ZTE Corporation. That's according to sources cited by Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, who now writes for WND:

In 2000, Huawei was virtually unknown outside China, but by 2009 it had grown to be one of the largest, second only to Ericsson.

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."

Sources add that most corporate telecommunications networks use "pretty light encryption" on their virtual private networks, or VPNs.

I found about Maloof's report via this week's edition of The CyberJungle podcast. Here's my rough transcription of what he says, at about 18 minutes and 30 seconds:

The Chinese government and the People's Liberation Army are so much into cyberwarfare now that they have looked at not just Huawei but also ZTE Corporation as providing through the equipment that they install in about 145 countries around in the world, and in 45 of the top 50 telecom centers around the world, the potential for backdooring into data. Proprietary information could be not only spied upon but also could be altered and in some cases could be sabotaged.

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