State hacking

We’re gonna talk a little bit now about state hacking and what that actually means. So for example there’s a lot of government secrets out there and it’s not common news that in the background of these things that this country is probably attacking their various other competitive countries for their private data. For example it’s quite… if you’ve read the BBC News, various other sources, it’s quite common that places like China and US have disagreements regarding the data that they’ve got. Things like products, IPs, research they’ve been doing suddenly appears in another country and they’ve turned it around very quickly to provide a product without having any background into that on previous occasions.

So there’s lots of concerns around how data can be stolen and there’s state attacks. And we’ll give an example of

recent: Huawei, a company that provides network-based capabilities. They had a contract in the UK to provide 5G mobile networks. This was also extended to other countries such as the US, there was Canada and others. But it was found that in all these network devices that they were supplying, somebody had left a back door to get into these platforms. And this is where the Chinese government have said that they’re not actually working with Huawei but there is a potential that somebody could get into this back door and then information from this about the Americans, Canadians and other countries can be fed back to the Chinese.

Now this isn’t proven yet, you know I’m on nobody’s side, I’m quite neutral on this, but maybe the things that we need to think about is why is this happening now? In all these network devices, the chips, the microchips, the processors, they’re all provided by US companies. And Huawei aren’t a new business, they’ve been around for many years. Why have they just started to attack this particular brand or manufacturer? Is it to do with the whole aspect of state secrets that could be leaked?

Imagine if these network devices were put inside a US government infrastructure and then someone had a back door into that, stole some pretty major information, top-secret information to do with the Air Force, you know, some nuclear kind of information, you know, how they manage systems, infrastructure, data they’ve even got themselves about other people, top-secret information. So, the state attack here is actually quite serious and that you will probably find that all of these countries are constantly building teams to protect borders and regions, any infiltration of their networks, especially when it comes to localised government.