The demise of an industry icon, Nortel Networks, as the evidence has now made clear, was the result of a cyber attack. Who could forget Nortel Networks’s place in the technology landscape? While the company is gone, their equipment is still in operations throughout the world.

In an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, it was reported that hackers had roamed freely inside Nortel’s vast corporate network for over a decade and contributed to the company going bankrupt in 2009.

Indications are that the attacker’s traffic was traced back to China. This came as a result of countless hours poring over log files until the investigators found the needle in the haystack.

According to Brian Shields, a long time Nortel employee and the point person on the investigation, the cyber espionage activities resulted in the exfiltration of technical papers, R&D documents, business plans, emails and other documents. They had full access to very sensitive information about the technology and plans of the company.

For years now, U.S. intelligence organizations and subject matter experts have warned of the vast array of clandestine cyber espionage activities of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). While some of these activities are the result of organizations in the private sector, the government is often cited as the sources of the acts of espionage. Naturally, the Chinese government has denied these allegations.

Think of the billions of dollars lost when Nortel’s stock price plummeted and the impact on all the employees who lost their jobs. Now consider all of the secure networks powered by Nortel’s technology and the potential security issues this breach poses.

This should be used as a case study in corporate cyber espionage and the devastating impact it can have.

Kevin G. Coleman is a long-time security technology executive and former Chief Strategist at Netscape. He is Senior Fellow with the Technolytics Institute, where he provides consulting services on strategic technology and security issues. He writes weekly for Breaking Gov on the topic of cyber intelligence.