UK cybersecurity centre isn’t too afraid of Huawei, report says

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has assessed the dangers of using Huawei’s 5G equipment, and it found that it’s not such a big deal, Financial Times reported Sunday. 

The cybersecurity centre’s findings have not yet been made public, but FT claims that it found “ways to limit the risks” from using Huawei’s equipment in 5G networks. 

The report doesn’t offer any further details, and an official review from the UK government — which will likely be strongly influenced by the NCSC’s findings — is expected in March or April. But if the UK government okays the use of Huawei’s 5G equipment in the country, it would be a blow to U.S. efforts to convince its allies to avoid doing so.

U.S. government agencies are officially banned from using Huawei and ZTE equipment via an executive order passed in Aug. 2018, and several other countries, including Australia and New Zealand, followed suit. The U.S. government thinks that 5G networks are more vulnerable to cyberattacks than previous generation networks, and is wary that Huawei, which has ties to the Chinese government, might conduct espionage on behalf of China. 

The news follows a report from German outlet Handelsblatt (via Reuters) in early February, which claimed that the German government is reluctant to ban Huawei 5G equipment in the country. 

Despite the controversy and the U.S. ban, there hasn’t been any publicly available evidence that Huawei has ever spied on the Chinese government. Huawei did get another round of bad publicity in Dec. 2018, when the company CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on suspicion of bank fraud. 

A Huawei spokesperson told Mashable via email that the company has “never been asked to engage in intelligence work on behalf of any government.” “If we were ever pressured to maliciously violate the trust of our customers, we would rather shut the company down,” the spokesperson said.