The Otago University cyber warfare expert says that hypothetically speaking it would be easy for Chinese technology company Huawei – banned last year as a security risk from Australia‘s national broadband project but still heavily involved here – to replace a piece of hardware with an embedded chip, giving it ground floor access to the nation‘s new IT system. (…)

He said the United States pulled a similar trick with the so-called Hagelin encryption machine, invented by Boris Hagelin in 1946 and sold to 130 duped countries through Swiss company Crypto AG. US, Swiss and German media reports in the 1990s said the US National Security Agency and German intelligence used a decryption device hidden in the code to read secret Libyan and Iranian messages in the 1980s.