Slashdot Mirror
More on Last Year's Cisco Source Code Theft
grazzy writes "The New York Times has a story about last year's theft of Cisco source code:
The incident seemed alarming enough: a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet. "
You win, buddy.
Too bad all you had time to say was "t".
What's a Thef????
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
More on Last Years Cisco Source Code Thef
Oh well! Should have used the preview button!!
Ahh yes... karma at work you stinky taco!
Get paid to code OSS
so now the hunt is on for the elusive stakkato...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Master of the ebonics.
It's infringement!
Oh wait, sorry, we're talking about code not music. It's theft!
self defending?????
I'm without a doubt no networking expert, so I'd like to ask one of you who is: if the source code for cisco's equipment is leaked, would that person have the ability to create some kind of virus/malware that could bring the internet to a screaching halt? What can they do, infect routers with viruses now? I guess I'm unclear on the real dangers in a situation like this.
This sounds like the old James Bond(TM) movies or similar ones. The thief breaks a system, takes and changes what he wants to and after a year the most powerful U.S. security agencies do not even know what was taken.
One slightly used t. Reward if found.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Internet Attack Called Broad and Long Lasting by Investigators
Thats about the only thing nerds/hackers are ever going to be doing that is described as "broad" and "long lasting".
Cisco uses two factor one time passwords for remote access. I don't see how planting a trojaned copy of SSH on the lab computers would give the hacker access to Cisco's systems.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Rather good timing that last night on "24" we see Cisco's name all over the screen's at the CTU command center and the actress works in the line "the Cisco network is defending itself" followed immediately by an Alienware laptop on the screen.
/golfclap foxtv
Just in time for major articles about how bad Cisco's security was that they had some source code stolen.
And people wonder why I don't watch television. Sad..just sad.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
This definetly goes to show that www.hackiis6.com's 18yr old rule was probably imposed to simply limit the number of hackers who will enter. Props to the kid for pulling this off... even if he did get into trouble =).
Get Paid to search
Try using a little more funny next time.
Why alarming ? The internet is still up and running since that last years theft.
(I guess it should be read last year's)
Sensationnal breaking news !
The programming instructions of Linux and Free/Net/OpenBSD, which run many of big corporations servers, is avalaible to the sight of anybody! That's alarming!
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
So let me get this straight. This lady knew that someone had breached her system and she a.) kept right on using it and b.) taunted the person who had breached her system? What was she thinking? If your machine has been compromised, pull the plug and clean it!
"Source Code Chef"? That may make more sense.
On one hand, the article claims that "With such information, sophisticated intruders would potentially be able to compromise security on router computers of Cisco customers running the affected programs" and on the other hand that Cisco itself claims that "the improper publication of this information does not create increased risk to customers' networks". These statements are, IMHO, in direct contradiction of each other. Who the hell should we believe?
I think that was the best he could do...
:(
What do Slashdot "authors" (editors) do all day? They publish about 35 stories in a 24 hour cycle, usually about 4 editors participating. That's about 1-2 stories an hour, with 1-2 authors overlapping shifts. The summaries take about 2 minutes max to read, and the stories take max 5-10 minutes. That seems ample time to catch dups, fix typos, spelling and punctuation errors. Why not? What else are they doing? Maybe they don't read Slashdot after they've published, so they don't see all the feedback on their poor editing performance.
--
make install -not war
...that all the discovered breaches are by inept, pimply-faced teens (regardless of how many times some news article quotes some 'expert' about how 'particularly clever' the idiot was), and that the really serious harm is being done by real pros who never leave a trace.
Scary...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
All your code are belong to us!
As a good number of regular slashdot readers are no doubt aware, full source code to Linux, Apache, etc. is available to anyone and they are more secure than their counterparts for this reason. If access to the source code for Cisco routers makes it possible to write a whole bunch of backbone-targeting virii that would really drop my opinion of Cisco routers considerably.
If you actually read the article, the exploit was not big deal either; some guy just distributed a trojan'd SSH client to a bunch of people and collected their passwords and then ran a bunch of rootkits. Nothing to see here.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
You expect these things when someone begins a sentence 'More on'
One of my English profs explained the importance of thinking through sentence structure so as not to be phonetically or grammatically careless, i.e. 'Me and Jim went to the arcade' as it could sound like 'Mean Jim went to the arcade', proper grammar is 'Jim and I went to the arcade.'
Thus endeth today's grammar report.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Tell me again why our IT department insists on using this buggy Cisco VPN Client POS that causes me grief on a daily basis...
I think the title sounds better when read out loud. I wonder if that was intentional? If so, it's pretty clever.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
I've been watching you Mr. Anonymous Coward, and I just can't figure you out. Why are you having a conversation with yourself. You just replied to your own post, then replied to the reply. In the spirit of Moe Jaffe and Dwight Latham, you're your own grandparent. Why?
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
So let me get this right.
::hides his Volvo::
Compromised Cisco.
Compromised US Military systems.
Compromised NASA systems.
Compromised research systems.
And released to his parents custody?! WTF?! Extradite his ass and slam him with everything we've got. For fuck's sake, you get more prison time for a copyright violation than rape and this asshat compromises private and government systems and gets released to his parents?!?!?!
Something's rotten in Denma^WSweden.
-AC
"last years theft" : A theft, in the last years of Cisco "last year's theft": A theft, in the previous year. Apostrophes do make a difference.
Yeah, why exactly is source access such an inherent security risk? It seems the author of this article has bought into the corporate attitude of proprietary software secrets.
I mean, 'cybersecurity' bigheads are all worried about Terrorists disabling our Internet Infostructure etc., but in real life it turns out that any vulnerabilities that could be used to break into (e.g.) the JPL, White Sands, the DoD etc. have already been exploited by petulant teenagers.
So in this sense, the script kiddies of the Internet are kinda like an early warning system: it's almost certain that before someone with serious intentions finds a nasty flaw and uses it, it'll be discovered by some kid who will promptly boast about it on IRC.
How lucky we are that terrorists find themselves vastly outnumbered by people with too much free time on their hands!
In other news, the source code for a different router/firewall technology was posted on the net: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/
I bet this guy's a /. reader.
a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet.
...
Just wait until these guys see apache.org
Wait, isn't open source code good? At least, that's what slashdot has been telling me. My whole world is starting to fall apart -- sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not? I can't handle that level of complexity.
Note that this article was written by the person famous for creating the myth of Kevin Mitnick being a super hacker. Markoff is largely responsible for the fear and paranoia surrounding Mitnick and consequently his unfair prison experience.
His articles were full of lies and exaggerations back then so I would take this article with a grain of salt as well.
Damn dude.. get out more.. seriously, I hate to be an asshole, and wren, if you are reading this, well, dismiss me as an asshole.. but she is NOT hot by any definition of *hot*.
lim wren{hot} --> 0
take a look... http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~wren/
Pron... fap fap fap.. review submission - quick edit.. browse for pron. fap fap fap..
I'm in deep trouble now aren't I?? oh well..
The problem is choice..
She did taunt anyone. She recieved taunts. It was these taunts that lead the authorities onto the trail. More so, his anger came from monitoring emails to the sys admin where he was called a "quaint hacker". The messages were not taunts. They were not even directed at him.
Anm
If the code in its entirety is leaked to a real self-respecting hacker, he ought to port the thing to x86 systems, possibly building a network driver interface to linux's network drivers. Before you know it, there are dell machines routing packets using IOS 12.4.
Hopefully that will motivate someone to build an IOS clone on an OpenBSD or NetBSD subsystem for multiple architectures...
mmmmmmmm IOS source code *drool*
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
surely you mean copyright infingement ?
....
I mean, the code was still there for cisco to use..right ? all that was done was to make an unauthorised copy of it
As odd as it sounds, both are correct. A sophisticated intruder could compromise security with the stolen code. Or not.
But for the sake of argument, suppose they do find flaws in Cisco's code. An exploit shows up on rootkit.org or someplace. It should be apparent from the exploit which flaws they're using, and so Cisco cleans up the flaw. In the long run, customers are actually safer.
It's sort of a backasswards way to open source your code.
sigs, as if you care.
Don't confuse this story with independent journalism; Markoff is out to make a mint here, however he can.
Markoff reportedly was pissed of at Kevin Mitnick for spurning a movie deal, and later set himself up to write "the Kevin Mitnick story", earning over a million dollars in the process.
Here's a link: http://www.labmistress.com/kevins_story.php
So one really has to wonder what the Truth is here, and whether Markoff is just trying to screw over some teenage kid in Europe in order to make another million off of it.
So I'd take anything that John Markoff has to say with a LARGE grain of salt. The same goes for the New York Times, which has officially encouraged this practice.
The real truth is probably out there; but I wouldn't expect to hear it from either John Markoff or the NY Times.
The biggest news here: the nytimes has a free, no reg required article!
My laboratory was hit. We're all linux machines. Turns out that I still had an account on a system at Stanford where I was faculty and I transferred some files via scp to my machine at my current university. 4-5 days later, i see some logins from Stanford to my machine but I because I had been using the Stanford account recently, it just didn't register.
/home directory (different from my main machine) and i notice a program (it was either brk.c or dobrk.c I think) that was on an unpatched system, allowed a priviledge escalation. I switch to root and look at the history and see a command to stop recording the command history but he (and the article indicates the person is male) misstypied it so i could see that he logged into this machine from mine, grabbed the source code for the exploit from a warez site, compiled, ran, got root, and just tooled around a little.
One day later, I'm on another lab machine using my lab
Because our machines are pretty isolated and don't have any hint of financial stuff, he seemed to just drop it. I called the sysadmin at Stanford, turned out that on a machine with over 500 accounts (i won't say which department), the machine had been rooted about 2 months prior and every password was being captured during that time. The breakin was tracked back through a couple of departments, then back to University of Michigan, then to Uppsala.
Three valuable and perhaps obvious lessons here. Local priviledge escalation exploits are important even if your system has very few users. Keep your system patched (duh...), and remember, if you log onto your machine from another, ask yourself "What do I know about the integrity of this machine?". I really assumed that my stanford account was pretty secure and so I didn't even think about logging from that machine to my current one. No more.
The other interesting thing was that the local exploit used on my machines was announced well after the Stanford machine was hit. I don't think I ever heard of how that machine was comprimised.
AL-0300-25468NA -- Tinfoil Hat Feature Set, North America
http://www.openbgpd.org/
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
...and hurt the writer's credibility.
"Last Years"?
That's "Last Year's".
Completely different meaning.
Duh.
Is it just me or is the timing of this article suspicious. Cisco reports earnings after the bell today!
It is:
More on Last Year's Cisco Source Code Theft
give the year its apostrophe!!!
"Programming instructions" for machines that power much of Internet already available.
Wren now has a Mac Powerbook which makes her feel
safe and secure. ( see the NYT photo )
This story does have a happy end!
The incident seemed alarming enough: a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet.
If you are going to lift your entire submission from a story, you could at least identify it as a quote.
Before any liberals are tempted to mod up one of my comments, a word of warning: I'm actually making fun of you.
Did he steal the manual? That doesn't sound very exciting.
.. it's not that different....
...the one you see running across your living room is the stupid one that isn't doing any damage and will probably win (or lose!) the Darwin award by stepping into a trap.
It's the SMART mice eating the food in your cupboard and breeding in the walls that you don't see you have to be concerned with.
The same comments apply to serial killers. The dumb ones get caught, the smart ones are scary.
Let's see here:
Their systems were broken into, and the code in question was taken without permission. Yes, it was stolen, and this was theft. There's a difference between this and downloading songoftheday.mp3 from a perfectly willing uploader. In this case, the person you are copying/taking the file from is willing, it's a third-partly that is being "infringed" upon. Now if you hacked the RIAA servers, found a cache of mp3's - perhaps for some unrealeased CD's or whatever - and downloaded them to your home machine... that would be wandering a bit more into the area of theft.
Sorry, but the concept that you can steal from somebody who doesn't retain the final physical product just doesn't work very well...
is this "More On Some Topic", or "Some Topic for Morons"? Looks to me like someone just submitted a mainstream news article which dumbs everything down and pisses off slashdotters in the process.
In other news, there are reports of books on "CCNA Certification" which tell hackers how to take control Cisco's internal router software.
...Stakkato had erased her computer file directory
This is why you need MORE THAN ONE "Computer File Directory." If she was smart, she would have had a false "Computer File Directory" with fake "computer files" (could they be files that weren't for a computer?), and a secret hidden SECOND Directory for all her important "computer files." That would fool that sneaky hax0r. He would probably never suspect a second "Computer File Directory."
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
The timing of this piece is suspect.
I found cisco IOS software on eMule a few months ago.
It was indeed CISCO software, as I was able to verify it.
I believe it was in reference to the fact that the last word in the headline was initially posted as "Thef." Not that the grandparent poster didn't sacrifice some, erm, elegance in exchange for expediency, but it makes some sense, at least.
One of the people who got hit is shown in a picture holding a powerbook. Does this mean that an Apple computer got rooted, or is that just a journalistic license to have her hold a computer, which just happens to be a pb. I understand that MacOS X has ssh installed on it, but wouldn't it be a different binary, therefore not succeptible to the hackers tricks?
" As a good number of regular slashdot readers are no doubt aware, full source code to Linux, Apache, etc. is available to anyone and they are more secure than their counterparts for this reason."
From the article:
"The crucial element in the password thefts that provided access at Cisco and elsewhere was the intruder's use of a corrupted version of a standard software program, SSH."
Not sure which version of ssh, but this illustrates that Unix is no more secure by design than Windows or anything else written in c.
Vote for Pedro
1) If you have access to some anonymous router you can have a totally clean trace while hacking into your next target. Think ssh over http to router and root at .gov from there.
2) A lot of machines on a typical network usually authenticates or restricts users based on their network location. Voila, you just gained an easy access to that very secret intranet page.
3) With access to router you are now in demilitarized zone. Think 3) Profit!!!.
4) Ever wanted to intercept people's pop3 passwords? With usual password use patterns it's a golden pot. Welcome, my root.
And this is just the beginning.
Said it before and i'll say it again..
....
... and there is a exploit for it , your stuffed..
Over specialise and you bread in weakness, its slow death
be it DNS server's, Web servers or Routers, if you only run the one type
Have a bit of variety and you should be *mostly* ok.
router#conf tc onfig)#This will screw the entire Internet. Are you sure? [Y]# debug meltdown :-)
router(config)#exec-Internet-meltdown
router(
router(config)#Y
router(config)#end
router
15:00:02 starting evil-BGP process
15:00:03 now routing packets to random destinations
15:00:26 evil-BGP process start request on adjacent routers. (success on 5 of 5 adj. routers. Propagating request......)
15:15:03 Warning: Internet is screwed. Please reload all routers to fix the Internet.
Does anyone recal that website that provides free passwords for newsites that require them? It was linked somewhere on here a few days ago.