Hi, I'm Rann Levy. Welcome back to Malicious Life in collaboration with Cyber Reason. At the end of our last episode, it kind of seemed like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications

company accused of aiding in state

cyber spying was completely innocent.

They were being accused of crimes they may not have committed

based on evidence that largely did not exist. The conspiracies around

them seem unfair at best, malicious at worse. But there's another side to this story of course.

Wauwai didn't end up on people's radar for no reason.

They've earned their notoriety. they're not a ride. I'll tell you a story so you see what I mean. Remember what

a meet Serper said earlier this episode about what Wauwe is like.

Think of Wauwe, sort of like a company like Cisco here in the US.

This comparison holds a little more weight than a meet let's on.

The reason why traces back to 2003 when the executive vice president at Cisco, Mark Chamler, flew to

Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, China to confront the CEO Ren Zengueh. The problem,

Cisco had reason to believe that Huawei was copying there, well, everything.

Maybe not everything, but manuals, help screens, the command line interface, and most of all source code for routers and switches.

The evidence was not ambiguous either. For example,

Wawa's manuals didn't just read like Siskos, they contained the same typos.

Even high schoolers know to reword the Wikipedia articles they copy into their history papers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, when Chandler presented the evidence to his face,

Zengueh replied by saying, quote, coincidence.

Sisko sued. In 2004, the parties settled out of court after Waui admitted to stealing some router software

and agreed to get rid of all the disputed IP. But if Cisco sought an end to the drama there, they wouldn't get it.

...