What possible purpose, or gain, could China obtain from putting in a back door on hospital monitoring equipment that displays a user’s vitals?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chinese-made-patient-monitor-contains-a-secret-backdoor
At least the NSA has the good sense to put backdoors in important software, like your graphics cards.
lol
You are correct, it is probably a forgotten debug procedure, but it could be used as a way to gather data. A succesfull breach is almost every time takes use of multiple flaws (accidental or intentional). This could be one. Even if the IP address in the code is a private one, an attacker could set up an NFS server inside a hospital and route that single known address (using other vulnerabilities of network devices for example) to his device. And that is why the IP isn't made public. So this is a big deal.
Rule of thumb with modern gadgets with network abilities - keep them in your local network and never allow them to reach internet. :)
Or write your own firmware, or use opensource one, like OpenWRT for routers.