How China Used Huawei In Secret Australia Telecom Hack: Report

As US has waged a global campaign to block Huawei from supplying state-of-the-art 5G wireless networks, the company and its supporters have dismissed the claims of security risk as lacking evidence.

The US government has warned for years that products from China's Huawei Technologies Co, the world's biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, pose a national security risk for any countries that use them. As Washington has waged a global campaign to block the company from supplying state-of-the-art 5G wireless networks, Huawei and its supporters have dismissed the claims as lacking evidence.

Now a Bloomberg News investigation has found a key piece of evidence underpinning the US efforts - a previously unreported breach that occurred halfway around the world nearly a decade ago.

In 2012, Australian intelligence officials informed their US counterparts that they had detected a sophisticated intrusion into the country's telecommunications systems. It began, they said, with a software update from Huawei that was loaded with malicious code.

The breach and subsequent intelligence sharing was confirmed by nearly two dozen former national security officials who received briefings about the matter from Australian and US agencies from 2012 to 2019. The incident substantiated suspicions in both countries that China used Huawei equipment as a conduit for espionage, and it has remained a core part of a case they've built against the Chinese company, even as the breach's existence has never been made public, the former officials said.