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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. "
What's a Thef????
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
so now the hunt is on for the elusive stakkato...
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Master of the ebonics.
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.
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
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!
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?
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.
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...
"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.
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/
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
Yes, I'm shocked anybody thinks a CCNA can control a Cisco router...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!