Articles

China’s exclusion from US 5G market likely to continue…

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Telecom insiders discuss supply chain security and call for better communication, collaboration, and transparency from the federal government about threats within their industry.
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As China’s Huawei faces ongoing banishment and retrenchment in Europe, the question arises whether Huawei and its peers, including telecom gear maker ZTE, will get a reprieve under the incoming Biden administration. Huawei clearly thinks it has a shot of improving its relationship with its European customers in the post-Trump era: Huawei Vice President Victor Zhang has been lobbying UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to revisit the ban against using his company’s technology in Britain’s 5G network build-out.

Huawei landed in its current predicament due to the Trump regime’s fears that the company works with the Beijing government to implant malware in its equipment. It might not fare better under a Biden administration.

China’s likely continued exclusion from US markets even under a Biden administration was a top topic at a webinar on supply chain security hosted by US Telecom and Inside Cybersecurity. “The cybersecurity policies overall between the Obama Administration and to Trump and now to president-elect Biden should be relatively consistent,” Norma Krayem, vice president and chair of the Cybersecurity, Privacy and Digital Innovation Practice at Van Scoyoc Associates, said. “I think that’s important for the private sector to see that there is that theme.”

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

Photo by Kamil Kot on Unsplash

Articles

Telecom insiders detail hardships posed by Chinese technology ban

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Banning Chinese Telecom vendors Huawei and ZTE creates fear, uncertainty and doubt as well as new supply chain security ideas among small telcos.
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Democratic Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Geoffrey Starks hosted a workshop on June 27 entitled “Find IT, Fix It, Fund It” to hear from “interested parties on how to address the national security threats posed by insecure equipment within our communications networks.” Although not explicitly stated in the Commission’s public notice or its press release, the issue addressed in the workshop is whether and how to remove from the nation’s communications networks technology from Chinese suppliers given the recent executive order banning American companies from using any telecommunications equipment deemed to be a security risk.

That order was squarely aimed at China’s top telecom tech providers Huawei and ZTE as well as any other Chinese tech vendor whose products appear in the nation’s communications networks. The half-day workshop featured a range of speakers including academics, small telecom providers, rival telecom tech providers and small telecom trade association representatives. Almost all spoke about the uncertainty and fear the ban has created and the stark financial and opportunity costs it will impose.

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

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Why the Huawei ban is bad for security

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Many believe the ban on exporting U.S. technology to Chinese company Huawei could hurt American tech vendors and do little to mitigate supply chain threats.
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Last week, Google reportedly warned the Trump Administration that its current ban on exports to Huawei might actually jeopardize national security by forcing Huawei to create an insecure fork of its Android operating system, according to the Financial Times.

That ban was imposed as part of a Commerce Department effort announced in mid-May which placed the Chinese telecom and tech giant on a U.S. export blacklist, the “entity list,” for its purported efforts to spy on behalf of the Chinese government. Two other companies — the telecom giant ZTE and a memory chip maker, Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit — were also placed on the list and the administration is now reportedly considering adding video surveillance company HikVision to it.

Two days before Google’s reported warning was made public, the Washington Post released the results of a survey of 100 cybersecurity experts from government, academia and the private sector who mostly concluded that the ban would only end up hurting U.S. tech companies and further diminish U.S. influence over the security of new products. One of the experts, former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, now a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, said that the ban could cause China to “emerge as the indispensable nation in consumer technology.”

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.