https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/did-a-chinese-hack-kill-canada-s-greatest-tech-company-1.1459269
By Natalie Obiko Pearson
Bloomberg Businessweek
July 1, 2020
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 $367 billion (about US$250 billion at the
time), accounting for more than 35 per cent of Canada’s benchmark stock
market index, the TSE 300. Nortel’s sprawling Ottawa research campus sat
at the centre 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 $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.”
[...]
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