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Chinese Hackers Had Unfettered Access To Nortel Networks For a Decade
An anonymous reader sends this quote from CBC News:
"Hackers based in China enjoyed widespread access to Nortel's computer network for nearly a decade, according to ... Brian Shields, a former Nortel employee who launched an internal investigation of the attacks, the Wall Street Journal reports [from behind a paywall]. ... Over the years, the hackers downloaded business plans, research and development reports, employee emails and other documents. According to the internal report, Nortel 'did nothing from a security standpoint' about the attacks."
The only reason was either incompetence, or a back-room deal with China that caused Canada to turn their eye the other way.
One has to wonder why Huawei rose to prominence so drastically... Where else have they been "researching" their technology?
nortel built a plant over there with the promise of getting some of the chinese telecom market share. the chinese sold them a plot of land in a flood plain so they could not use the first floor for about half the year. shortly after the plant went live i started hearing stories of chinese companies making exact duplicates of our equipment and selling it to their customers. i think we got no more then 1-3% market share even though we originally had the best equipment.
what gets me are all the companies standing inline to get in there. haven't they read all the stories about the corporate espionage that occurs once you let them into your systems.
One tiny detail this summary neglected to mention is Nortel went bankrupt 3 years ago.
They had no interest in pursuing the investigation because there was pretty much no way it was going to make their assets look any *more* valuable to buyers...
the chinese sold them a plot of land in a flood plain so they could not use the first floor for about half the year.
Sorry, but those guys sound like idiots.
Whether you're in the US, or in China, there is such a thing called due diligence. Either they made the trade-off decision to knowingly buy heavily discounted land in a flood plain, and accepted the risk commensurate with that choice, or they were just sheer incompetent lazy idiots and the project was doomed from the very beginning.
And yes, I've been involved in purchasing land abroad (not in Asia thought), and I've been shown land in flood plains before (after all, local sellers and local real estate agents see foreigners as easy marks for not knowing the lay of the land, and not knowing the lay of the local legal landscape either).
the chinese sold them a plot of land in a flood plain so they could not use the first floor for about half the year.
Sorry, but those guys sound like idiots.
Hey I worked at Nortel!
Well... Honestly, there's a reason it's out of business. I won't say there weren't good people there. There were lots of very smart hard working people. But I have never worked at a place, before or since, where there was so much funny business going on. I quit because I couldn't stand it any more. On my exit interview I wrote, "Nortel suffers from a culture of corruption. If these issues aren't dealt with promptly, I fear the company will go under." And that was when the company was at its peak.
Issues I personally dealt with included having a middle manager push through a custom software change that potentially allowed an Australian bank to avoid long distance charges on it's toll free lines. I also did an audit that discovered that several of the middle managers had lied about work that they had accomplished (as programmers) and even though there were many (unworking) features associated with their name, they had never checked in a single line of code. An executive once spent $600K on printing a banner for a party (the work being done by his brother's company). I could go on and on.
If Nortel bought land in a flood plain in China, it may have been bad for the company, but I seriously doubt it was a mistake. Somebody benefited.