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As the United Kingdom decided to ban Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from its 5G telecoms networks, the debate over security risks from Chinese equipment came to the fore again.
The British government recently replaced security equipment supplied by Chinese-owned technology companies in the offices of key government officials.
This comes after MPs and their peers called on the British government to crack down on the use of surveillance equipment by two Chinese companies banned by the Washington Financial Post, the Financial Post reported.
However, there is one threat that has gone under the radar, the tiny things made by Chinese companies in Internet-connected devices.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from niche industrial applications to becoming ubiquitous in homes, offices, and some vehicles. These technologies are great for helping us in our daily lives, but in a hostile country like China, they are data collectors that can be used to influence or intimidate an enemy, company, or individual.
All these connected functions are enabled by micro cellular IoT modules. Like semiconductors or 5G base stations, they are rarely marketed as complete products, which goes some way to explaining why the risk seems lost on London and Washington.
According to the publication, US Cyber Security Agency CISA recently warned of serious vulnerabilities in Chinese-made GPS-enabled IoT devices in cars and motorcycles. Hard-coded administrator passwords and other flaws have been found to not only allow Chinese suppliers to remotely monitor the location of these devices, but also to cut off fuel supplies while vehicles are in motion.
Meanwhile, Professor Fraser Sampson, Commissioner for Biometric Materials and Surveillance Cameras, welcomed the UK’s move to replace China’s surveillance system.
He told Asian Lit that other government departments will review their existing systems and consider the proposed clauses to procure surveillance and security equipment.
Sampson is a criminal justice expert and national chairman of the Association of Chief Police and Crime Executives. The market is dominated by personal and unsupervised recording devices such as dash cams, mobile phones and video doorbells, etc.
“We don’t need so many CCTV cameras in our public places. We just need a system to collect the content and make it useful for security purposes,” he said.
Other rights groups are campaigning for a ban on Hikvision and Dahua in the UK over the companies’ involvement in the repression of Uyghurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. Hikvision and Dahua cameras are used in concentration camps throughout the Uyghur region. Both companies have contracts worth at least $1.2 billion for 11 different large monitoring projects in the region.
Chinese authorities As many as 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities have been held in concentration camps since 2017, according to numerous investigative reports by researchers, think tanks and foreign media.
(Only the title and image of this report may have been reproduced by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content was automatically generated from the syndicated feed.)
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