When he announced the results of his study in , Calof said he hoped its conclusions would serve as a lesson to other Canadian tech firms about the dangers of growing complacent and losing touch with their customers. You kind of shake your head.
From Date. To Date. Content - Any - Article Event Information. Article Type - Any - Article Video. Jan 14, pm EST. Telfer School of Management. That's the bottom line. He called this lack of confidence the "black cloud. Calof said his study has dozens of lessons for the technology sector, and for troubled smartphone company BlackBerry.
Social Sharing. A group of former Nortel executives, convinced the company could be turned around with better management, put together a buy-out bid. It would be backed, the Ottawa Citizen reported, by Huawei acting as a minority shareholder. Ren has offered a different version of events, telling the Globe and Mail last year he was interested in buying Nortel, but that the plan died after the nearly insolvent Nortel said it wanted a controlling share of Huawei.
When the intelligence agency warned the company, it all but ignored CSIS. This led Juneau-Katsuya to a startling conclusion:. A little later, around , U. It involved Huawei itself, say three former employees. With an office across the freeway from a Nortel facility in Texas, Huawei returned a fibre card — essentially a computer device — used in Nortel data switches and asked for a refund, recalls Lawrence Bill, a forensic analyst who worked on the subsequent investigation.
Former colleagues Tony Anastasio and Brian Shields confirmed the incident, though say they recall it was a front company that had bought the equipment and passed it on to Huawei. Meanwhile, the company started noticing knock-off versions of some of its products in Asian markets, he says.
Nortel considered suing, but dropped the matter after the Huawei office across the road in Texas closed down, says Bill. Velshi says he asked counterparts in Huawei around the world if they knew anything about such an episode 20 years ago and came up blank.
The Canadian government has never accused it of anything like that, he says. It first came to light in the spring of when a Nortel employee in the U.
The Brit helpfully emailed the manager — optical-networks president Brian McFadden — to say he was available to answer any questions McFadden might have about the material.
Larry Bill, based in Raleigh, noticed a troubling fact: Logs indicated that McFadden had signed into the Nortel system from multiple locations around the world, places he had never visited. Security advisor Brian Shields discovered that not one, but seven Nortel executives, including CEO Frank Dunn, had been hacked, and that the hackers were vacuuming an alarming volume of sensitive material out of its databases.
By the end of his investigation, Shields says he was able to track the theft of over 1, documents from the LiveLink server, and that was only during a six-month period when bosses allowed him to monitor the stealing.
He says it lasted past , when he was laid off. The structured nature of the IP addresses used to siphon off those Nortel files, not to mention the sophistication that allowed the incursion to go undetected for years, point to the involvement of a skilled, government-directed outfit, Shields says. Mandiant tracked thefts of data from companies in 20 major industries. The reams of material, he says, included a document that laid out current Nortel technology and the direction various products were headed; a sales proposal that would include pricing and network design; technical papers on aspects of optical circuits; and an analysis of how Nortel lost a contract with former Internet firm Genuity.
This was a very capable adversary. You have to be pretty darn good to achieve such a level of stealth. He has no evidence of who ultimately received the documents, but notes that only a Nortel competitor would benefit from the information, helping it develop products, craft sales pitches and out-sell rivals. Shields cannot prove that Huawei benefited from the hacking, but is convinced that its rise to a world telecommunications superpower — as Nortel simultaneously withered away — is no coincidence.
The National Post has viewed the first two pages of the internal report Shields and Bill prepared in , the remaining 12 taken up by a list of the stolen documents. And yet he is certain the Nortel CEO never saw that report. His investigation wound down after a few months, and it appears no one notified firms that later bought Nortel assets that its computers might be infected. CSIS got in touch again early in , offering to help Nortel with the hacks, Shields says, but by then it was too late.
0コメント