Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada's Greatest Tech Company?
Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company?
Nortel was once a world leader in wireless technology. Then came a hack and the rise of Huawei.
By Natalie Obiko Pearson at Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china-steal-canada-s-edge-in-5g-from-nortel?utm_source=url_link
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The documents began arriving in China at 8:48 a.m. on a Saturday in April 2004. There were close to 800 of them: PowerPoint presentations from customer meetings, an analysis of a recent sales loss, design details for an American communications network. Others were technical, including source code that represented some of the most sensitive information owned by Nortel Networks Corp., then one of the world’s largest companies.
At its height in 2000, the telecom equipment manufacturer employed 90,000 people and had a market value of C$367 billion (about $250 billion at the time), accounting for more than 35% of Canada’s benchmark stock market index, the TSE 300. Nortel’s sprawling Ottawa research campus sat at the center of a promising tech ecosystem, surrounded by dozens of startups packed with its former employees. The company dominated the market for fiber-optic data transmission systems; it had invented a touchscreen wireless device almost a decade before the iPhone and controlled thousands of fiber-optic and wireless patents. Instead of losing its most promising engineers to Silicon Valley, Nortel was attracting brilliant coders from all over the world. The company seemed sure to help lay the groundwork for the next generations of wireless networks, which would be known as 4G and 5G.
Back then, Ottawa, not traditionally (or since) known for its glamour, seemed full of sports cars, corporate jets, and even society scandals featuring tech CEOs. In 1999 the co-founder of Corel Corp., who’d gotten his start at Nortel’s precursor company, threw a gala at which his wife showed up in a C$1 million leather bodysuit with an anatomically correct gold breastplate and a 15-carat-diamond nipple. “You were just surrounded by the most interesting and intelligent people that you could find anywhere in the world,” says Ken Bradley, who spent 30 years at Nortel, including as a chief procurement officer. “Nobody would ever tell me I couldn’t do something.”
Nortel’s giddy, gilded growth also made it a target. Starting in the late 1990s, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s version of the CIA, became aware of “unusual traffic,” suggesting that hackers in China were stealing data and documents from Ottawa. “We went to Nortel in Ottawa, and we told the executives, ‘They’re sucking your intellectual property out,’ ” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asia-Pacific unit at the time. “They didn’t do anything.”
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