Huawei tablet snooping on IT engineer in Taiwan from China
- 5 years ago
TAIPEI — A Huawei Mediapad M5 was found to be sending data from several apps back to China by a Canadian IT engineer living in Taiwan.
Talking to Taiwan News, the man said he bought Huawei device about six months ago and installed a firewall program to identify apps running in the background in order to disable them to save battery life.
The engineer soon found several applications were running in the background and sending data back to servers in China without ever having asked his permission.
The man said the apps continued to run in the background even after being disabled. He said the apps are sending information such as browsing data and login details like usernames and passwords.
He told Taiwan News that most of the pre-installed Huawei software was sending data to Shanghai Dnion Information Technology Co. Ltd, in Beijing.
He said that data often goes through a cloud server Huawei uses in Singapore to scoot around the Great Firewall of China.
A list of 23 different apps were found to run no matter what he did or how many times he turned them off.
Apparently, when he turns on his 4G in Taiwan, all the Huawei apps, including camera, gallery and files send out data queries, with some apparently bypassing Singapore and going straight to the Chinese IP addresses.
In addition to Huawei servers, some apps on his phone were also trying to send data to Google and Facebook.
Talking to Taiwan News, the man said he bought Huawei device about six months ago and installed a firewall program to identify apps running in the background in order to disable them to save battery life.
The engineer soon found several applications were running in the background and sending data back to servers in China without ever having asked his permission.
The man said the apps continued to run in the background even after being disabled. He said the apps are sending information such as browsing data and login details like usernames and passwords.
He told Taiwan News that most of the pre-installed Huawei software was sending data to Shanghai Dnion Information Technology Co. Ltd, in Beijing.
He said that data often goes through a cloud server Huawei uses in Singapore to scoot around the Great Firewall of China.
A list of 23 different apps were found to run no matter what he did or how many times he turned them off.
Apparently, when he turns on his 4G in Taiwan, all the Huawei apps, including camera, gallery and files send out data queries, with some apparently bypassing Singapore and going straight to the Chinese IP addresses.
In addition to Huawei servers, some apps on his phone were also trying to send data to Google and Facebook.