A UK government report aiming to assess the cybersecurity risks of using Huawei technology for the establishment of 5G networks across the country, discovered that products of the Chinese tech giant are riddled with simple yet severe security vulnerabilities that put users at risk.
The Trump administration has boycotted Huawei over security concerns and is leading an international campaign to get its allies to do the same in order to prevent the company from providing the Chinese government with access to the data and systems of foreign governments.
So far, the UK has refused an outright ban, but the findings of the report may change that. For even though the report does not identify the security flaws it found as intentional backdoors, it notes that the issues are related to “basic engineering competence and cyber security hygiene” and that any threat actor could take advantage of them in order to hack into systems. In other words, state-backers from China or any other country could exploit the vulnerabilities. As one security experts commented: “There is no backdoor, because Huawei doesn’t need a backdoor. It has a front door.”
On Friday, Huawei announced that despite the boycott campaign by the US, the company’s net profit increased by 25% last year to $8.8bn.
Read more: The Huawei Threat Isn’t Backdoors. It’s Bugs
