Huawei has spied, installed data ‘back door’ in Pakistan: Report

Business Efficiency Solutions, a small contractor based in the US, has alleged that Huawei Technologies Costole trade secrets, and spied on Pakistan using the same.

In a lawsuit filed at a Federal Court in California, the company has said that Huawei had directed it to create a system locally in China as this would allow it to get its hands on sensitive information about governments officials and citizens in Lahore.

This could be done by gaining access to a safe-cities surveillance project.

In the lawsuit, BES said that Huawei's alleged back door was located in a database that consolidated sensitive information. This also included national ID card records, foreigner registrations, tax records and criminal records, for law enforcement.

As per the Wall Street Journal, “Huawei-China uses the proprietary DES (Data Exchange System) system as a back door from

China into Lahore to gain access, manipulate, and extract sensitive data important to Pakistan’s national security."

The California-based software company said that after it installed the DES in Lahore, Huawei demanded in 2017 that it install a duplicate DES in China’s Suzhou.

BES said it would give Huawei direct access to the data being gathered in Pakistan.

Muhammad Kamran Khan, chief operating officer of the Punjab Safe Cities Authority, which oversees the Lahore project said that they have begun looking into BES’s allegations.

He was quoted by the WSJ as saying, "Our team is examining the accusations and sought an explanation from Huawei. We have also put a data security check on Huawei after this issue. So far, there has been no evidence of any data-stealing by Huawei".

However, a Huawei spokesperson said the company does not comment on ongoing legal cases. As per WSJ, she said, "Huawei respects the intellectual property of others, and there is no evidence Huawei ever implanted any back door in our products".