https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-military-attack-on-nortel/
It was a mind-blowing clue.
In 2004 Nortel cyber-security advisor Brian Shields investigated a serious breach in the telecom giant’s network. At the time Nortel’s fibre optics equipment was the world’s envy, with 70 per cent of all internet traffic running on Canadian technology.
And someone wanted Nortel’s secrets.
Shields found that a computer in Shanghai had hacked into the email account of an Ottawa-based Nortel executive. Using passwords stolen from the executive the intruder downloaded more than 450 documents from “Live Link” — a Nortel server used to warehouse sensitive intellectual property.
Shields soon found the hacker controlled the accounts of at least seven Nortel executives. This was no random cybercriminal. But who was it?
Shields examined the numerical internet addresses of computers extracting Nortel data and found that they were clustered into a tiny pinprick of cyberspace. He was stunned because it looked like a room filled with web servers. Whoever was behind these hackers, Shields believed, seemed to control China’s internet.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Shields said.
“I knew this couldn’t be happening by chance.”
China ‘totally took us down’: former Nortel cyber-security investigator
Shields says the Internet addresses were all registered to Shanghai Faxian Corp., a company with no connection to Nortel that Shields determined was a front with no real business in China.
Shields spotted another major clue in Nortel’s logs of network traffic from Saturday, April 24, 2004. According to Shields, in just seven hours a Shanghai Faxian address downloaded 779 documents that day using the account of Nortel CEO Frank Dunn. The hack occurred four days before Dunn was fired, amid an investigation of accounting irregularities. To Shields, this suggested the Shanghai hackers knew exactly what Nortel’s board of directors planned, and the perfect time to extract a massive cache of records.
“To date, we have 1,488 documents which were downloaded,” Shields wrote to Nortel’s management in his “data theft” investigation report. “China is the source of all extractions we are aware of.”
For months Shields tracked the hackers. But Nortel’s brass was mostly disinterested in the investigation and did little more than change executive account passwords, Shields says. He says they were more focused on year-to-year profits and innovation budgets than protecting Nortel’s precious research. Mike Zafirovski, Nortel’s CEO from 2005 to 2009, did not respond to questions for this story sent to his LinkedIn account. Zafirovski said Shields was known to “cry wolf” and management didn’t believe hacking was a real issue, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2012.
So the systematic hacking continued, Shields says. And as a result, Shields says, in 2009 — after getting massively underbid on a series of contracts by China’s state-champion company Huawei — Nortel went bankrupt.
In the end, Shields determined China’s government gained complete control of Nortel’s internal systems. After ten years of cyberattacks they could see everything Nortel was doing, he says. The infiltration was so insidious, Shields says, that technicians in China could send encrypted packages of stolen Nortel data to Shanghai and Beijing, by sending Internet commands to a “backdoor” buried in a Nortel computer.
To visualize that in the real world — it would be similar to a foreign army constructing a hidden tunnel into Canada’s treasury vault, and marching out unimpeded with gold bars.
And it was more than coincidence, Shields believes, that upstart Huawei suddenly replaced Nortel as the world’s dominant internet technology provider.
“You could have put Steve Jobs in to run Nortel. But if you are up against a nation-state, Nortel would have failed, without Canadian government intervention,” Shields said.
“Canadians just don’t realize the extent of the Chinese government’s involvement in this thing.”
Alliance Canada Hong Kong leader says a Huawei 5G network in Canada would track citizens
Now, more than 20 years after Nortel was first warned of Chinese Communist Party espionage, Hong Kong Canadians such as Cherie Wong say that Ottawa’s failure to protect Nortel and to promptly bar Huawei from modern 5G networks is putting lives at risk.
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