Venezuela’s President Maduro shows Huawei Mate X6 gift from China’s President Xi Jinping, hailing it as “unhackable” by U.S. spies.
Last week, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro showcased a Huawei Mate X6 smartphone, reportedly gifted by China’s President Xi Jinping, claiming that US cyber spies cannot hack it.
Venezuelan President Maduro said that his device is “the best phone in the world”
“Impressive, I find out everything through this, the phone that Xi Jinping gave me. Look, Xi Jinping gave me this, a Huawei, the best phone in the world, the Huawei, and the Americans can’t hack it, neither their spy planes, nor their satellites.” said Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro during a press conference on September 1st, 2025.
Is Huawei Mate X6 smartphone really difficult to hack? Why?
Any device can be compromised, particularly when targeted by a well-resourced and highly capable adversary, such as a nation-state actor.
However, when a company produces both the hardware and the operating system for its devices, as Huawei does with HarmonyOS and the Mate X6, the attack surface becomes different from that of devices built on widely used platforms like Android or iOS. On one hand, this integration can make hacking more difficult, because the software is tightly coupled with the hardware and may use proprietary designs, undocumented features, or unique security mechanisms that are less familiar to attackers. This reduces the availability of public research, exploits, and off-the-shelf tools that hackers often rely on.
However, this same integration also introduces challenges: if the operating system is relatively new, like HarmonyOS, it is more likely to contain implementation errors and design flaws, since it hasn’t undergone years of global scrutiny like iOS or Android. For governments or skilled actors, this means there may be more vulnerabilities to discover. The complexity grows further with patching: even if Huawei promises monthly updates, the fragmented delivery across models and carriers can leave devices exposed for long periods.
In March 2014, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed a major U.S. intelligence campaign against China, focusing on Huawei. Targets included former President Hu Jintao, ministries, banks, and telecom firms, but Huawei was central. According to the popular newspapers Der Spiegel and The Times, in 2009 the NSA launched “Shotgiant” to infiltrate Huawei, a rival to Cisco. The NSA copied a customer list of 1,400 firms, internal training docs, and even accessed Huawei’s email archives and source code. By exploiting Huawei’s central mail hub in Shenzhen, the agency read communications from top executives, including CEO Ren Zhengfei.
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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Venezuela’s President Maduro)
