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Huawei was able to eavesdrop on Dutch mobile network KPN: Report

177 points by edwinjm 5y ago

xster 5y ago
Was there an article in there? Seems like there's only an insinuation of a possibility of a fan fiction story there.
- swinglock 5y ago
  The title of the article doesn't match the content. The article says it's possible they could have eavesdropped because they have access, but not that they did.
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    It does say Huawei also knew which numbers were tapped by police and intelligence services. If that's true it's bad enough. But it sounds like they are just saying Huawei engineers had access to the internal network at certain times for debugging purposes. Which is not surprising at all.
    - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
      Of course they knew, because KPN is unable to run its own network, they outsourced everything. This has been knows for years.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      The opposite would be infinitely worse. That is if Huawei were one administering the network. Allowing any government organisation option to wiretap any connection without any knowledge or controls is entirely against western values. Logically police and intelligence services should be ones telling ISPs what to tap. And they should only comply with proper process. Anything else is totalitarianism.
- dragonelite 5y ago
  Like most Huawei/Chinese tech fud stories we have seen the last 3~4 years. A lot of posturing but no evidence or proofs strong enough to force a lawsuit. Reality is the anglo-europeans(atlantic coastal folks) wants to split the world in half at least in cyber space. Pompeo talked about it openly with the Clean network initiative. That means no Chinese tech or hardware in the west. They will pull the whole of the EU with them either peaceful and if that doesn't work forcefully.
  - gataca 5y ago
    China has split the cyber world in half with their Great Firewall. Until they open their cyber space up to the west I don’t see any reason why the outside world would allow state-controlled Chinese companies to have access to their markets/networks.
    - dragonelite 5y ago
      We in the west were above those petty things right, we could out innovate the Chinese etc. But the clean network initiative isn't only about China, its also about Iran and Russian. I expect a big boom in Iran tech, the following next two decade now that China has given them a get out of jail card from the western financial siege war. Its not like western companies don't have access at all, Facebook for example still earns quiet some money from China selling ads, Google was planning on making a Chinese specific search engine called Project Dragonfly. Would google really allocate all those resources for a market they can't access?
      - zthrowaway 5y ago
        Yes go ahead and innovate around them as they steal your intellectual property. If the Chinese networks / markets were so easy to penetrate as you are suggesting, why would Google have to spend so much time developing a separate search engine for them to be approved by the CCP? Why wouldn’t they just use the search engines that are already out there? It’s pretty obvious as to why.
        5y ago
LatteLazy 5y ago
Once again a huge accusation with zero evidence. It's almost as if people don't trust Huawei (and do trust Apple, Cisco, etc) for purely ideological reasons... >KPN informed the news source ANP on Saturday that "it has never been established in all years that customer data was stolen by Huawei from our networks or our customer systems, or that it has been tapped."
- mam2 5y ago
  We dont TRUST more. We accept it because yes, the ideologies / lifestyle of our allies are not openely opposef to ours. Id rather live in a democracy that promotes human rights and work life balance, than in China where people work like 12h a day for no reason and massively torture people who are a bit different
- gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  Apple does have a history of standing up to the US governmental agencies. The CCP will not allow Huwawei to operate unless they bend over to them. See what they did to AliBaba a few days ago, not to mention how they disappeared their CEO.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Apple (rightly) refused to assist the FBI and that's better than many. But the NSA is known to have total access to everything on your iPhone if they want it [1]. Any European politician wonder about eavesdropping has at least as much to worry about from the US (both government and commercial) than China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog (see DROPOUTJEEP)
grezql 5y ago
nltimes looks like a front for disinformation campaign? I never heard of it. Their contact page has no names.
terom 5y ago
The title is misleading... my interpretation of the contents is that KPN outsourced the maintenance of their mobile core network to Huawei, and that Huawei personnel as a result had full technical access to the network. There is no evidence given than Huawei actually abused that access, which would indeed be major news. I assume they had some contract to spell out the legal level of access that Huawei had... the level of technical access would presumably have been exactly the same had they outsourced the maintenance to a western company, the legal protections would presumably just have more weight in that situation. The worrying part is that the owner of the network apparently lacked audit logs of any such technical level access. That's still just as much of a problem with insider threats if the company manages the network themselves?
- rapsey 5y ago
  If you buy huawei 4g/5g equipment, can you run it yourself completely? It is probably completely standard if you have their gear to also pay for their support and thus needing to give them access to your network.
  - g_p 5y ago
    Most operators take a support and maintenance contract. It's also worth remembering that many operators don't have the staff needed to even install radios and other distributed equipment - often the radio vendor can offer that service to you as well. You can run a mobile network with minimal external access, but the economics are such that few want to - in an era of outsourcing and managed services, it's less about what can be done, and more about what is done in reality. Managed service providers have significant levels of access into mobile networks, beyond what many are aware.
    - rapsey 5y ago
      Which is why the US was so adamant against western countries buying from a Chinese vendor.
      - 5y ago
the-dude 5y ago
If you repeat it often enough, it automatically becomes true. It is a smear campaign. Weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the capitols of Europe.
ENOTTY 5y ago
The article seems poorly translated (into English), so I’m going to avoid reading too much into it. But one thing I want to highlight is the fact that this story appears to be based off a report written by a consulting firm, Capgemini. For that reason alone I would bet that this report identifies hypothetical risks, not actual instances of unauthorized access.
dtf 5y ago
At the risk of whataboutism, I can’t help be reminded of that time when the British security services eavesdropped on Belgacom. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Socialist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Socialist
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonelite 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing i wasn't aware of this Operation yet, the big example you usually hear is the NSA was recording Merkel's her phone as allies spying on each other.
BruceEel 5y ago
Local and, sadly, KPN customer here. Try google translating: https://nos.nl/artikel/2377038-huawei-kon-gesprekken-kpn-klanten-afluisteren.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2377038-huawei-kon-gesprekken-kpn-kla... Anyway, KPN laat vanochtend aan de NOS weten dat nooit is vastgesteld dat er door Huawei klantgegevens zijn ontvreemd uit het netwerk of de klantsystemen, of dat er is afgeluisterd. KPN told NOS (the above news site) that there is no evidence Huawei collected customer personal info or that they've eavesdropped. The bad news is that that's because they have no way of knowing, as mentioned elsewehere in the article.
- Freestyler_3 5y ago
  They couldn't see what was happening because it was in chinese...
  - k_sze 5y ago
    Even if everything was in Chinese, hiring a Chinese translater costs pennies compared to any disaster that this could cause. The translater doesn’t even need to be Chinese; there are probably enough Europeans who have studied in China and returned.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  Yeah, it's not that it eavesdropped, but that it gave itself the opportunity to do so, and that no systems were in place to keep track of that - i.e. that whether it happened or not, KPN would not be able to have evidence of that. That said, a month ago it was reported [1] that Huawei did explicitly add a way for them to access customer data of one of KPN's subsidiaries, and that it used that "regularly". Could theoretically be e.g. to aid debugging or something, but not a great look. [1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2374551-huawei-had-onbeperkt-toegang-tot-miljoenen-klantgegevens-van-telfort.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2374551-huawei-had-onbeperkt-toegang-...
Proven 5y ago
This call may be recorded for customer support and quality improvement purposes...
alwayshasbeen 5y ago
This is a classic form of propaganda: The title suggests clearly that Huawei has spied on a Dutch mobile network when none of this is true, so single evidence is given that they really did it.
bondarchuk 5y ago
I have made an English translation of the original article in De Volkskrant (https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/huawei-kon-alle-gesprekken-van-mobiele-kpn-klanten-afluisteren-inclusief-die-van-de-premier~bd1aece1/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/huawei-kon-alle...) https://0bin.net/paste/poCzYk4t#IRjhnXLT31zdiDMCVJIIqvZgLDqh4mx8M8NjBstgxly https://0bin.net/paste/poCzYk4t#IRjhnXLT31zdiDMCVJIIqvZgLDqh... Edit: updated to add responses of KPN, Huawei and several experts.
maurys 5y ago
Is there a reason the HN title is so flagrantly different from the title if you jump to the link? "Huawei was able to eavesdrop on Dutch mobile network" in the original sounds a lot less incriminating than "Huawei eavesdropped"
- terom 5y ago
  The linked news site changed the title. You can still see the original in the linked URL: chinese-technology-company-huawei-eavesdropped-dutch-mobile-network-kpn
splithalf 5y ago
Are we just supposed assume that global superpowers engage in espionage against their enemies? As other posters say, where is there proof China would spy?
stunt 5y ago
Title is misleading. But, maybe we should talk about outsourcing! Most people do not know how awful is their trusted brand at managing its contractors. Often there is no technical team to lead and control. They only hire a bunch of incompetence product managers with power point skills that have no clue about what is going on.
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago
"My CIA branded telephone was recording my calls? Preposterous."
dathinab 5y ago
> ”Huawei employees have not had unauthorized access to KPN's network and data, nor have they extracted data from that network. Huawei has at all times worked under the explicit authorization of KPN,” But doesn't the article also imply (who knows if it's true) that such access would not have been logged, in which case how can Huawei be sure there was no access by an employee which did abuse it (and was neither asked by Huawei to do so nor did Huawei know about it). Much of the "spying" attributed to companies like Cisco or Huawei are generally not done by the company but by people working for it which act outside of the companies directions (but likely where directed by external powers like the Us or China). Similar in both countries there are non-public court decisions under which we can't guarantee that the Company wasn't forced to do so and forced to tell everyone they didn't do anything like this. (can't guarantee doesn't mean it happened, just that there is no guarantee). Which is in the end the whole problem with Huawei (or Cisco) even if the companies clearly have no intention to do such thinks, it's very likely that employees from them or even they themself are forced to do such things in some cases, especially if trade and/or political relationships degrade.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Huawei could always login into german, dutch, czech systems, even while there was a procedure for password rotation by network administrations. This isn't the case with Cisco or others. Which you are implying. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/180606/huawei-kon-rond-2009-ongehinderd-meeluisteren-met-alle-mobiele-kpn-klanten.html https://tweakers.net/nieuws/180606/huawei-kon-rond-2009-onge... ( Dutch IT site)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

177 points by edwinjm 5y ago

xster 5y ago

Was there an article in there? Seems like there's only an insinuation of a possibility of a fan fiction story there.

swinglock 5y ago
The title of the article doesn't match the content. The article says it's possible they could have eavesdropped because they have access, but not that they did.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  It does say Huawei also knew which numbers were tapped by police and intelligence services. If that's true it's bad enough. But it sounds like they are just saying Huawei engineers had access to the internal network at certain times for debugging purposes. Which is not surprising at all.
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    Of course they knew, because KPN is unable to run its own network, they outsourced everything. This has been knows for years.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    The opposite would be infinitely worse. That is if Huawei were one administering the network. Allowing any government organisation option to wiretap any connection without any knowledge or controls is entirely against western values. Logically police and intelligence services should be ones telling ISPs what to tap. And they should only comply with proper process. Anything else is totalitarianism.
dragonelite 5y ago
Like most Huawei/Chinese tech fud stories we have seen the last 3~4 years. A lot of posturing but no evidence or proofs strong enough to force a lawsuit. Reality is the anglo-europeans(atlantic coastal folks) wants to split the world in half at least in cyber space. Pompeo talked about it openly with the Clean network initiative. That means no Chinese tech or hardware in the west. They will pull the whole of the EU with them either peaceful and if that doesn't work forcefully.
- gataca 5y ago
  China has split the cyber world in half with their Great Firewall. Until they open their cyber space up to the west I don’t see any reason why the outside world would allow state-controlled Chinese companies to have access to their markets/networks.
  - dragonelite 5y ago
    We in the west were above those petty things right, we could out innovate the Chinese etc. But the clean network initiative isn't only about China, its also about Iran and Russian. I expect a big boom in Iran tech, the following next two decade now that China has given them a get out of jail card from the western financial siege war. Its not like western companies don't have access at all, Facebook for example still earns quiet some money from China selling ads, Google was planning on making a Chinese specific search engine called Project Dragonfly. Would google really allocate all those resources for a market they can't access?
    - zthrowaway 5y ago
      Yes go ahead and innovate around them as they steal your intellectual property. If the Chinese networks / markets were so easy to penetrate as you are suggesting, why would Google have to spend so much time developing a separate search engine for them to be approved by the CCP? Why wouldn’t they just use the search engines that are already out there? It’s pretty obvious as to why.
      - 5y ago

LatteLazy 5y ago

Once again a huge accusation with zero evidence. It's almost as if people don't trust Huawei (and do trust Apple, Cisco, etc) for purely ideological reasons... >KPN informed the news source ANP on Saturday that "it has never been established in all years that customer data was stolen by Huawei from our networks or our customer systems, or that it has been tapped."

mam2 5y ago
We dont TRUST more. We accept it because yes, the ideologies / lifestyle of our allies are not openely opposef to ours. Id rather live in a democracy that promotes human rights and work life balance, than in China where people work like 12h a day for no reason and massively torture people who are a bit different
gher-shyu3i 5y ago
Apple does have a history of standing up to the US governmental agencies. The CCP will not allow Huwawei to operate unless they bend over to them. See what they did to AliBaba a few days ago, not to mention how they disappeared their CEO.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Apple (rightly) refused to assist the FBI and that's better than many. But the NSA is known to have total access to everything on your iPhone if they want it [1]. Any European politician wonder about eavesdropping has at least as much to worry about from the US (both government and commercial) than China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog (see DROPOUTJEEP)

grezql 5y ago

nltimes looks like a front for disinformation campaign? I never heard of it. Their contact page has no names.

terom 5y ago

The title is misleading... my interpretation of the contents is that KPN outsourced the maintenance of their mobile core network to Huawei, and that Huawei personnel as a result had full technical access to the network. There is no evidence given than Huawei actually abused that access, which would indeed be major news. I assume they had some contract to spell out the legal level of access that Huawei had... the level of technical access would presumably have been exactly the same had they outsourced the maintenance to a western company, the legal protections would presumably just have more weight in that situation. The worrying part is that the owner of the network apparently lacked audit logs of any such technical level access. That's still just as much of a problem with insider threats if the company manages the network themselves?

rapsey 5y ago
If you buy huawei 4g/5g equipment, can you run it yourself completely? It is probably completely standard if you have their gear to also pay for their support and thus needing to give them access to your network.
- g_p 5y ago
  Most operators take a support and maintenance contract. It's also worth remembering that many operators don't have the staff needed to even install radios and other distributed equipment - often the radio vendor can offer that service to you as well. You can run a mobile network with minimal external access, but the economics are such that few want to - in an era of outsourcing and managed services, it's less about what can be done, and more about what is done in reality. Managed service providers have significant levels of access into mobile networks, beyond what many are aware.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    Which is why the US was so adamant against western countries buying from a Chinese vendor.
    - 5y ago

the-dude 5y ago

If you repeat it often enough, it automatically becomes true. It is a smear campaign. Weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the capitols of Europe.

ENOTTY 5y ago

The article seems poorly translated (into English), so I’m going to avoid reading too much into it. But one thing I want to highlight is the fact that this story appears to be based off a report written by a consulting firm, Capgemini. For that reason alone I would bet that this report identifies hypothetical risks, not actual instances of unauthorized access.

dtf 5y ago

At the risk of whataboutism, I can’t help be reminded of that time when the British security services eavesdropped on Belgacom. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Socialist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Socialist

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dragonelite 5y ago
Thanks for sharing i wasn't aware of this Operation yet, the big example you usually hear is the NSA was recording Merkel's her phone as allies spying on each other.

BruceEel 5y ago

Local and, sadly, KPN customer here. Try google translating: https://nos.nl/artikel/2377038-huawei-kon-gesprekken-kpn-klanten-afluisteren.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2377038-huawei-kon-gesprekken-kpn-kla... Anyway, KPN laat vanochtend aan de NOS weten dat nooit is vastgesteld dat er door Huawei klantgegevens zijn ontvreemd uit het netwerk of de klantsystemen, of dat er is afgeluisterd. KPN told NOS (the above news site) that there is no evidence Huawei collected customer personal info or that they've eavesdropped. The bad news is that that's because they have no way of knowing, as mentioned elsewehere in the article.

Freestyler_3 5y ago
They couldn't see what was happening because it was in chinese...
- k_sze 5y ago
  Even if everything was in Chinese, hiring a Chinese translater costs pennies compared to any disaster that this could cause. The translater doesn’t even need to be Chinese; there are probably enough Europeans who have studied in China and returned.
Vinnl 5y ago
Yeah, it's not that it eavesdropped, but that it gave itself the opportunity to do so, and that no systems were in place to keep track of that - i.e. that whether it happened or not, KPN would not be able to have evidence of that. That said, a month ago it was reported [1] that Huawei did explicitly add a way for them to access customer data of one of KPN's subsidiaries, and that it used that "regularly". Could theoretically be e.g. to aid debugging or something, but not a great look. [1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2374551-huawei-had-onbeperkt-toegang-tot-miljoenen-klantgegevens-van-telfort.html https://nos.nl/artikel/2374551-huawei-had-onbeperkt-toegang-...

Proven 5y ago

This call may be recorded for customer support and quality improvement purposes...

alwayshasbeen 5y ago

This is a classic form of propaganda: The title suggests clearly that Huawei has spied on a Dutch mobile network when none of this is true, so single evidence is given that they really did it.

bondarchuk 5y ago

I have made an English translation of the original article in De Volkskrant (https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/huawei-kon-alle-gesprekken-van-mobiele-kpn-klanten-afluisteren-inclusief-die-van-de-premier~bd1aece1/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/huawei-kon-alle...) https://0bin.net/paste/poCzYk4t#IRjhnXLT31zdiDMCVJIIqvZgLDqh4mx8M8NjBstgxly https://0bin.net/paste/poCzYk4t#IRjhnXLT31zdiDMCVJIIqvZgLDqh... Edit: updated to add responses of KPN, Huawei and several experts.

maurys 5y ago

Is there a reason the HN title is so flagrantly different from the title if you jump to the link? "Huawei was able to eavesdrop on Dutch mobile network" in the original sounds a lot less incriminating than "Huawei eavesdropped"

terom 5y ago
The linked news site changed the title. You can still see the original in the linked URL: chinese-technology-company-huawei-eavesdropped-dutch-mobile-network-kpn

splithalf 5y ago

Are we just supposed assume that global superpowers engage in espionage against their enemies? As other posters say, where is there proof China would spy?

stunt 5y ago

Title is misleading. But, maybe we should talk about outsourcing! Most people do not know how awful is their trusted brand at managing its contractors. Often there is no technical team to lead and control. They only hire a bunch of incompetence product managers with power point skills that have no clue about what is going on.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 5y ago

"My CIA branded telephone was recording my calls? Preposterous."

dathinab 5y ago

> ”Huawei employees have not had unauthorized access to KPN's network and data, nor have they extracted data from that network. Huawei has at all times worked under the explicit authorization of KPN,” But doesn't the article also imply (who knows if it's true) that such access would not have been logged, in which case how can Huawei be sure there was no access by an employee which did abuse it (and was neither asked by Huawei to do so nor did Huawei know about it). Much of the "spying" attributed to companies like Cisco or Huawei are generally not done by the company but by people working for it which act outside of the companies directions (but likely where directed by external powers like the Us or China). Similar in both countries there are non-public court decisions under which we can't guarantee that the Company wasn't forced to do so and forced to tell everyone they didn't do anything like this. (can't guarantee doesn't mean it happened, just that there is no guarantee). Which is in the end the whole problem with Huawei (or Cisco) even if the companies clearly have no intention to do such thinks, it's very likely that employees from them or even they themself are forced to do such things in some cases, especially if trade and/or political relationships degrade.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
Huawei could always login into german, dutch, czech systems, even while there was a procedure for password rotation by network administrations. This isn't the case with Cisco or others. Which you are implying. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/180606/huawei-kon-rond-2009-ongehinderd-meeluisteren-met-alle-mobiele-kpn-klanten.html https://tweakers.net/nieuws/180606/huawei-kon-rond-2009-onge... ( Dutch IT site)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]