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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. "
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.
only if there are flaws in said code.
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?
...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.
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.