Researchers recently had a look at 25,000 leaked Huawei resumes and found worrying links to Chinese military and intelligence agencies.
The findings suggest that Huawei’s links to the Chinese government may be closer than previously believed.
The study of these resumes was conducted by Christopher Balding of the Fulbright University Vietnam. The study processed data from over 590 million Chinese resumes. Chinese companies leaked over 590 million resumes through open databases in April in a mistake believed to be the result of poorly secured MongoDB databases and ElasticSearch servers that were left exposed. This massive dump of data led to the study that revealed the links between Huawei and military and intelligence agencies.
The 25,000 Huawei resumes were searched through for key terms, including “People’s Liberation Army,” which narrowed down the study to 100 individuals with experience in national security. Balding released the findings of his study online, although he’d edited it to protect the identities of the individuals described in the study. One such example describes an R&D engineer who worked for Huawei while serving as a Ministry of State Security representative. This individual is reported by Baldwin to have been “engaged in behavior that describes planting information capture technology or software on Huawei products,” while working on “building lawful interception capability into Huawei equipment.” The work that this individual was engaged in affects both domestic and international Huawei projects.
It should be noted that Balding’s study isn’t exhaustive, although Balding stated that he didn’t undergo a more comprehensive study because policy makers are currently in need of information on Huawei. “Huawei understands that cyber security concerns are paramount in the digital world. We welcome professional and fact-based reporting on investigations into Huawei’s transparency. We hope that any further research papers will contain less conjecture when drawing their conclusions, and avoid so many speculative statements about what Professor Balding ‘believes,’ ‘infers,’ and, ‘cannot rule out,'” one spokeswoman told Business Insider.
