This is quite important for the current debates we're having. If you look at the news media, or the Hacker News front page for that matter, you stumble upon articles accusing China and Russia to hack into foreign governments regularly. Similarly, China and other asian countries are often accused of adding backdoors to their hardware (e.g., routers, switches, telco equipment). The only* backdoors ever found in hardware were found in hardware build by US-based companies. And, of course, Stuxnet is the first example of governments (USA and Israel) attacking a foreign country's critical infrastructure with a "digital weapon." I'm not sure how to feel about that.
*I'm not sure this is still true today
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Let me add that, when it comes to topics like this one we should probably stick to what we know for sure. Figuring out if code is a backdoor or a bug is already hard enough (not always though). The same goes for attacks. Governments accuse each other of doing a lot of things, and fortunately, sometimes they even admit that they make these claims up.
Oh and please don't take my word for any of this. There are well known and respected people who speak very openly about these topics on conferences like CCC, DEFCON, etc.
*I'm not sure this is still true today
---
Let me add that, when it comes to topics like this one we should probably stick to what we know for sure. Figuring out if code is a backdoor or a bug is already hard enough (not always though). The same goes for attacks. Governments accuse each other of doing a lot of things, and fortunately, sometimes they even admit that they make these claims up.
Oh and please don't take my word for any of this. There are well known and respected people who speak very openly about these topics on conferences like CCC, DEFCON, etc.