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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. "

12 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. hackiis6's 18yr old rule should be tossed out. by hydroxy · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 =).

  2. [OT] Re:Did they steal the editor too? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Informative
    What's a Thef????

    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
  3. Catastrophic apostrophic by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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.

  4. John Markoff by wackysootroom · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:John Markoff by thulorn · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've known Wren since college, and I share two (non-Berkeley) systems compromised by "Stakkato", and much of the article was spot on. The Cisco stuff I don't know anything about, but the hacker had broken into clusters at Berkeley and Caltech, and a private shared machine, and bragged about much much more. People we knew near Caltech security didn't say much, but indicated that the wave of breakins was in fact widespread and worrisome. IT people I know at Indiana University with TeraGrid connections also indicated at the time that much was going on. E-mails forwarded from the hacker showed much immaturity and petty malice, on top of deleting her home directory ("computer file directory" in the article.)

      Oops, another friend closer to the action said the Cisco stuff is accurate too.

      As for the powerbook in her lap, that was posed by the photographer. It was the UCB Unix machines which were hacked.

  5. RTFA by Anm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  6. Re:We got hit. by s.d. · · Score: 4, Informative

    it was probably dobrk, that was one of the vulnerabilities the attacker(s) used last year to root systems.

    see http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/xfdb/13880 (this was the 1st google link i saw, there are probably others with better information but i'm lazy).

  7. Re:It's not theft! by Halo- · · Score: 4, Informative
    Oh wait, sorry, we're talking about code not music. It's theft!

    I know you're trying to be funny, but I think you're missing something basic. The reason this is "theft" and not "infringement" is because the intruder made a copy of something not generally released. (the source code).

    In the music world, if someone buys an album, and gives copies to his or her friends, he is violatating the artist's right to control copies. (i.e. their "copyright"). If that same person hacks into the artist's recording studio, and downloads unreleased tracks, the artist has had those tracks stolen. It is a "theft".

  8. Re:Hmmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    So far you have criminal trespass (or whatever the computer equivalent is) and infringement, but still no theft.

    Also, there really is no difference between this and downloading songoftheday.mp3 unless you want to say only the original uploader of songoftheday.mp3 is a thief and everyone else is just an infringer. What about the people who downloaded the leaked code, are they thieves or infringers?

    While I applaud your lame attempt at a meta troll, I must say, your warped ideology does not make it theft.

  9. Re:Question for an expert... by Keruo · · Score: 2, Informative

    They didn't use holes in cisco routers to break into their network.

    They used stolen passwords gathered from other hacked machines by using trojaned sshd's.

    Says so in TFA.

    --
    There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
  10. Re:Wren Montgomery by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Actually, the photographer insisted the laptop be held so the logo was in view. Even though the hacking had nothing to do with the laptop.

  11. Re:Wren Montgomery by thulorn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Your guess is perfectly accurate; a Berkeley department cluster, with Wren having no power beyond informing the sysadmins of the breakin, which she promptly did.