Another Bloomberg Coup!
I saw this report on the news feed and the first thing that came to my mind is "Wasn't it that lot that ran the report about the secret Chinese spy chip?". And so I dismissed the whole report as just crap.
Now we discover its a Telnet port. Telnet isn't particularly secure but it rather depends on the context. I wouldn't use it on the public Internet unless I was interested in honeypots (for example) but there are lots of times its perfectly adequate. Its also really easy to turn off.