Nortel Networks was under siege to hackers for a decade

The Canadian telecoms company Nortel Networks was reportedly hit by hackers for almost ten years.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, hackers enjoyed widespread access to the company computer network of Nortel Networks for almost a decade.

It claimed that using seven passwords stolen from top Nortel executives, including the executive executive, the hackers penetrated Nortel's computers to no less than the year 2000 and stole technical papers, research and development reports, business plans, employee emails and other documents.

Brian Shields, a former employee who spent 19 years on the firm, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, said the hackers hid spying software so deeply on employee computers that it took the corporate years to determine the level of the difficulty.

“They'd access to everything. They had a large number of time. All they'd to do was work out what they wanted,” he said.

A San Francisco Chronicle story from January revealed that town College of San Francisco have been infested with viruses since 1999, with poor network design, old equipment, a "Draconian system" for agreeing new policies and little money available for brand spanking new, virus-resistant technology blamed by the varsity CTO.

McAfee's Shady RAT report from last summer revealed details of prolonged infections that affected "every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets".

James Todd, European technical lead at FireEye, told SC Magazine that this demonstrates how porous sites could be and said that vendors have a responsibility to chat to customers about what's going on.

He said: “The number-some thing that CISOs say to us is they want to know what's happening with their network, so that they need visibility. We realise that we have to do education and work at the language used. In spite of everything, what's malware? This is a very general term â€" how does it get in and propagate?

“The length of this threat shows that nobody was watching it.”