“Huawei denies claims of wrongdoing in North Korea and Czech Republic and downplays EU cybersecurity concerns”, 24 July 2019

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei… denied media reports that suggested it had engaged in potentially unlawful activities in North Korea and the Czech Republic, while playing down European policymakers’ general cybersecurity worries.

“We have never been engaged in any intelligence activities in the Czech Republic, and we do not operate in the DPRK,” Jakub Hera Adamowicz, Huawei’s European Union media manager, said, referring to North Korea’s official name at a press conference in Brussels.

Czech public radio… alleged that a unit of Huawei in the Central European country had “secretly collected personal data of customers, officials and business partners”.

It said the data was stored in a system that could be accessed by Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen in southeastern China’s Guangdong province.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Huawei, working with a Chinese state-owned company, had “secretly helped” Pyongyang build and maintain North Korea’s commercial wireless network.

The allegations came as the European Commission gathers feedback from EU member states and other parties on cybersecurity risks as it sets policy guidelines for its next-generation 5G technology.

Huawei, increasingly tagged a cybersecurity risk in the West, has published a position paper online detailing the 10 big digital challenges it says will require European decision-makers’ close attention in the future.

But a European official who had reviewed the paper and spoke on condition of anonymity called it “quite astonishing that Huawei listed cybersecurity as the last of the 10 challenges.

“[Cybersecurity], after all, is the only challenge it faces,” the official said.

Huawei described cybersecurity as “a never-ending story” in the report.

“It is not a problem that can be solved by a ‘once and for all’ security design,” the company wrote...