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The article takes a lot of words to explain they left a telnet server open. It wasn’t some super secret hidden thing.

• sterlind 8y ago
  Ah, but the article said that the telnet server "could still be launched," not that it was necessarily open. It could be one of those "magic knock" packets that 'launches' telnet, like the backdoor found in some Cisco routers a while back. Also weird is that Huawei insisted on keeping it open until they'd completed testing... does that mean it's phoning home? Or that they have their own technicians coming around to service it? Such a crappy article. Bloomberg should have learned from the Supermicro fiasco to include more details and not parrot a single source. At this point if IC is serious about Huawei posing a national security risk they should arrange a leak of their actual intel to force real public discussion..
  • jeroenhd 8y ago
    "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" Some lazy engineer probably added the feature as a remote monitoring/debugging tool with no regard for security because it needed to work before the next big release. Disabling the feature before the next release would probably break all kinds of support and monitoring, potentially leading to instability or them being unable to service failing equipment.
    • threeseed 8y ago
      Thankfully not all of us take your approach. Because you should always assume malicious intent when it comes to IT security.
• jsty 8y ago
  Whether or not it was the intention here, leaving a common or garden vulnerability as a backdoor gives excellent plausible deniability. "Whoops, we overlooked that" is much easier to explain away than an obviously designed remote access mechanism