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Comment by QuarterReptile | Hacker News Reader

This isn't that different from what probably happened an Nortel in the early 2000s. While their network was completely compromised by Chinese attackers, the C suite people downplayed the threat, and there are theories that this only happened because there were enough moles keeping everyone complacent so they wouldn't get too excited about the existential threat they faced. And now, after the most hostile of takeovers, they go by the name Huawei.

Edit: if you want a thorough version of the Nortel story, I recommend this podcast: https://malicious.life/chinas-unrestricted-warfare-part-1/

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An alternative interpretation of what happened to Nortel is that they made a lot of money, got complacent, stopped innovating, sat on their laurels, utterly failed to adapt to changing demands from their customers, or to keep up with competing vendors, imploded, and then the C-suite covered for its numerous failings by blaming China.

"Hackers stole our sauce" may be a plausible explanation for why a competitor got a jump-start, but its not a plausible explanation for why your business fell apart - especially considering that Cisco, Nokia, RIM, and many, many other western communication vendors continued to thrive after Nortel's disaster.

Nortel died because it couldn't adapt, the same way that RIM invented the smart phone, and then died, because it couldn't compete with Apple.

Also, worth noting that Canadian tech firms don't pay well, so all the talent goes south, and then those same firms grouse about their inability to compete with the valley.

> An alternative interpretation of what happened to Nortel is that they made a lot of money, got complacent, stopped innovating, sat on their laurels, utterly failed to adapt to changing demands from their customers, or to keep up with competing vendors, imploded, and then the C-suite covered for its numerous failings by blaming China.

A third option is all the fraud that happened at the company. Hard to keep investor's confidence when everyone is being audited for accounting fraud [0].

> Also, worth noting that Canadian tech firms don't pay well, so all the talent goes south, and then those same firms grouse about their inability to compete with the valley.

Why would they do that? I recall someone telling me that an internship at BlackBerry was a positive signal, but a full time position not so much when looking at resumes. How do they think they can compete for talent?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel#After_the_Internet_bubb...

I don't think low investor confidence was the reason for Nortel's spectacular negative cash flow, as much as customers losing faith with crappy, overpriced products.

That, and basing their business on selling film in an age of digital cameras.

An ISP I was working for in the late 1990s, early 2000s were looking at acquiring new modem kit with higher port density (yes, this was totally sensible at the time). Among the providers we were looking at were Nortel.

Now, we had a price separation between multi-link PPP and single-link PPP and for a variety of reasons, we did this by having the multi-link calls terminate in dedicated equipment.

This worked fine for a day or so, until the Nortel CVX started rebooting in "peak dial-in time" (somewhere in the 3 PM - 4 PM bracket). And we could not for the LIFE of us understand why. Got Nortel on the case, they could not even recreate the crash in their lab. Until I happened to ask about their simulation parameters. They were doing a 1 multi to 5 non-multi mix, at about 75% of the incoming call rate we had.

That, alas, was not enough to tickle the bug, which was basically that the CVX had to shift either the first or the second call of a pair onto the same DSP, and if a new cal arrived between "start the move" and "finish the move", the call being moved would simply be lost to data corruption. And when the watchdog would go through and check for internal data sanity (once per second or so), it'd fall off the data chain and the watchdog timer would reset the chassis.

Nortel declined to fix the bug. We declined to keep (or pay) for the equipment. I was not massively surprised with Nortel eventually folding.

Wow this is fascinating. Can you recommend any further reading on this subject? This is a degree of corporate espionage I've never thought of before.

Edited my post to add a multi part podcast recommendation.

Fantastic. Thank you for that! Excited to give it a listen

Direct link to the podcast episode of the Nortel story: https://malicious.life/episode/episode-113/

I want to say there was a darknet diaries episode on something related to this - a long term IR engagement, about to kick out the attack, suddenly attackers disappear. Few days later, M&A announcement. Hacking as due diligence.

> And now, after the most hostile of takeovers, they go by the name Huawei.

I was curious about this statement but on reading up on the topic, it doesn't seem to me that Nortel was "taken over" by Huawei?

From my understanding the technology was stolen and produced/sold cheaper by Huawei undercutting Nortel and putting them out of business.

Sorry, I was being a bit too sarcastic for plain text. All the exfiltrated IP went to Huawei, which rose to global preeminence 5 or so years later, while Nortel was imploding (mostly decay of a complacent giant, as others have pointed out.)

Fair enough!

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