Lucent Sees No Evidence Implicating It In Anonymous E-Mail To Rival
Dow Jones Online News, Tuesday, September 22, 1998 at 22:58
By Shawn Young, Staff Reporter
NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- There is no evidence that Lucent Technologies
Inc. or one of its employees was the source of a disparaging,
dead-of-night, anonymous e-mail about one of its competitors, a Lucent
spokesman said Tuesday.
Ciena Corp. (CIEN) said last week it had traced the e-mail to a
Lucent (LU) facility in Murray Hill, N.J., where Lucent has its
headquarters.
The e-mail was sent at 3:47 a.m. Aug. 28 to Ciena's former merger
partner, Tellabs Inc. (TLAB), before the $7 billion merger agreement
between Tellabs and Ciena collapsed amid a downpour of bad news from
Ciena. It accuses Ciena of faking test results on its phone-network
equipment.
Ciena's stock suffered a steep decline after the merger fell through,
sinking $8.531 to $19.75.
Ciena said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission
last week that it suspects the merger may have been undermined by
"legally questionable" activities by competitors. It did not give
specifics.
Ciena has consistently stopped short of accusing Lucent or its
employees of sending the e-mail or sabotaging its merger, but it did say
it traced the message to a Lucent address.
Indeed, it did come through a Lucent address, but one that is
available to the general public and that handles more than 600,000
transactions a day, said Lucent spokesman Bill Price.
He said the e-mail came through a Lucent service that helps Internet
users evade marketers and other sources of unwanted e-mail by, in
effect, giving them an alias and a dead-end return address.
The fact that the e-mail came through that server, located in Murray
Hill, hardly means Lucent was responsible, Lucent spokesman Price said.
"It never touched our internal network," he said.
It is possible but improbable, Price said, that a Lucent employee
could have used a laptop to log on to the Internet through a public
Internet provider and sent the message over a phone line through the
Lucent Personalized Web Assistant. But there's no evidence that is what
happened, he said.
"It's ludicrous to implicate Lucent simply because the server sits on
our facility," Price said. "The service is available globally to the
public and averages 600,000 transactions per day from people outside
Lucent."
The company has been investigating the e-mail, he said, and it has
uncovered no evidence linking anyone on its staff to the message, which
has been traced to an e-mail account with an Internet service provider
Price declined to identify. "We've got no evidence that any Lucent
employee originated this message," he said.
Both companies said they continue to investigate the source of the
e-mail.
Dan McCurdy, Ciena's vice president for marketing and strategic
transactions, said "we have no reason to doubt them."
"We have never made any allegation that it was Lucent," he said. "We
have never made any allegation that Lucent did anything wrong."
However, he said, the origin of the e-mail remains a mystery.
McCurdy last week said the allegations in the e-mail are
"categorically false."
-By Shawn Young; 201-938-5248; shawn.young@cor.dowjones.com
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