In a Bloomberg report dated 30 April 2019, under the heading - The West Finally Has Its Huawei Smoking Gun, it reports that as far back as 2009, Vodafone Group Plc — one of the world’s most powerful and far-reaching telecom companies — found hidden backdoors that could have given Huawei access to its fixed-line network in Italy. It appears that the author for the report is expecting a rebuttal for the article as he qualified with this statement - 'Expect Huawei proponents and telecom operators to dismiss this revelation as an aberration that proves nothing'.
Surprisingly, the rebuttal or response were from Vodafone themselves who, in a statement to the BBC on the same date 30 April 2019, said the following:
The issues in Italy identified in the Bloomberg story were all resolved and date back to 2011 and 2012.
The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that is commonly used by many vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic functions. It would not have been accessible from the internet.
Bloomberg is incorrect in saying that this 'could have given Huawei unauthorised access to the carrier's fixed-line network in Italy.
The response from Vodafone to say Bloomberg is incorrect is very damning. And this is not the 1st time Bloomberg was 'caught' with incorrect reporting. Apparently this is a familiar territory for them. In October 2018, Bloomberg issued a report titled 'The Big Hack: How China used a tiny chip to infiltrate US companies' claiming the existence of hardware backdoors in products from Supermicro Computers, without providing evidence. In the wake of that report, Apple CEO Tim Cook called on Bloomberg to retract the story.
In our article tilted 'The Age Old Problem of Fake News' https://www.sysarmy.net/cybersecurity360/the-age-old-problem-of-fake-news posted on 11 March 2019, we wrote 'Where misinformation refers to inaccuracies that stem from error, meanwhile, disinformation is deliberate falsehood promoted by design'.
Is Bloomberg part of the larger agenda in the efforts by the west to 'demonise' Huawei and its 5G technology?
