Indian government starts hacking probe on Huawei over national security concerns

A Wall Street Journal report said that China's Huawei Technologies is currently the subject of a probe by the Indian government over allegations of hacking in telecommunication networks of one of its state-run companies. Telling lawmakers in the lower house of the Indian Parliament, India's junior minister for communications and information technology Killi Kruparani reportedly said that the government is investigating the Chinese mobile company over hacking on the networks of Indian phone company Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.

In a written response to queries from Parliament members, she said, "An incident about the alleged hacking of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd network by Huawei, a Chinese telecom company, has come to notice. The Government has constituted an inter-ministerial team to investigate the matter."

Upon the news, a spokesman of the Indian unit of Huawei has categorically denied the Chinese firm's involvement in the hacking of Bharat Sanchar NIgam's networks. The spokesman said, "Huawei India denies such alleged hacking and continues to work closely with customers and governments in India to address any network security issue that may arise in technical and business operations (in) full compliance with network security norms, regulations and laws."

Huawei and peer ZTE Corp came under fire as the state of India has pressured both companies to provider details about the Chinese companies' ownership as concerns about the equipment posing a threat to national security has risen.

WSJ said Chinese electronics companies in India saw their growth slowed down after New Delhi issued a mandate that foreign telecom companies need to obtain security clearance prior to importing equipment from the mainland. For a short time, WSJ said the Indian government had blocked imports of equipment used for telecommunications coming from China over fears that malware used to bring down networks could be embedded in the equipment. The country later lifted the restrictions, WSJ added.

Tags

Huawei Technologies Co, India, ZTE Corp

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