I worked for Northern Telecom, which became Nortel Networks in the late 1990s. Nortel was a great company to work for. I left Nortel to start my own business in 1988. I eventually took it public on NASDAQ as chairman and CEO roughly 5 years later. But that is not the story here.
The story here is that Chinese companies have been stealing Fortune 100 companies (NGOs) and Federal and State Government trade secrets, formulas, manufacturing processes and anything else you can think of in business for decades. Everyone knows that. But we continue to allow it to happen. Companies do not invest enough capital in private and public network security much less in theft of secrets and network security training for their employees.
Now even politics even play into the trade secret theft game. More on that later.
Just ask anyone in any company how much security training they have received in the past 12 months. I will bet good money that the answers you will receive will be “maybe an hour or two” of formal training, if that. More likely you will hear we received “a couple of emails from corporate” describing the nature of network security and the prevention of theft of company secrets. The focus mostly being on phishing and email hacks will be about all you hear.
This is frightening for our future. The future of our children and grandchildren is at stake here. All we see in the news is maybe a short blurb on Hauwei and the issues they have in Canada, the original corporate home of Nortel Networks.
At the request of the US Canada arrested the CFO of Hauwei, Meng Wanzhou, last December on charges of portraying the company as a threat to U.S. national security and that it conspired to violate U.S. sanctions.
It is known that Hauwei is the company that benefited from the espionage of Nortel Networks! They are banned by the US Government from selling any equipment in the US due to overt company wide network breach by Hauwei of Nortel Networks.
Lenovo, once an IBM brand, was cited in October 2018 for possibly spying on US tech firms via a chip the Chinese manufacturer installed in all their servers, laptops and desktop computers. If you remember, Lenovo was an IBM brand a few years back and sold to a Chinese company. The brand name allowed it to be purchased as a trusted brand by a lot of companies and individuals in the US for many years. Google it; Lenovo espionage via chip.
Now Trump’s name has come up in the news as eyeing the possibility of intervening in the Canadian court case of Hauwei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou if it furthers his aspirations to a new China trade deal! So Trump will sell out to a company that has been caught red handed in corporate espionage in the USA and Canada.
But back to the Nortel Network story. This link will give you all the gory details of the $30 Billion dollar bankruptcy that came from the espionage of Nortel Networks. By stealing all of Nortel’s trade secrets and engineering documents Hauwei was and is still able to build telecom and data networks that are identical to Nortel’s and sold for 50% of the price Nortel sold them for. That is how Nortel went bankrupt! Keep digging and you will find the Nortel bankruptcy connection to Hauwei.
Now if you add in specialized espionage chips (it is easily possible) into all of the equipment Hauwei manufactures and you have industrial / Government espionage at levels never seen before! This is exactly what is at stake here.
If Trump is allowed to negotiate trade deals using companies as pawns in the game known to commit corporate espionage, we have possible collusion unheard of at the highest level in the world! Or maybe it is just plain old ignorance. Either way, it could undermine our entire country’s security, both private (NGO) and Government sectors.
Should Hauwei successfully petition the US courts and/or our Government relents and allows Hauwei to sell telecom and data equipment into the US markets, we better all start speaking Chinese fast as we will be compromised quickly by the theft of all of our company and Government secrets.
Corporate espionage is happening under your feet, right now. Who in your home and office is securing your network and email to prevent the Chinese, N Koreans and Russians from stealing your secrets? You better find out.
Canada is in the middle of this mess at our request, but we are in it up to our necks as well. All of us better pay close attention!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-risks-of-chinas-huawei-to-canada_2661441.html
http://fortune.com/2018/10/05/asian-tech-stocks-china-spy-chip-bloomberg/
https://www.heraldsun.com/news/business/article209689744.html