Cisco Flaw Opens Routers to Attack

Jack writes "Cisco is suffering from a serious flaw in its router operating system, which might allow execution of remote code: 'Cisco has warned of a new flaw in its IOS router operating system which might be used by attackers to launch denial of service attacks or take over IOS-based devices. The flaw causes to buffer overflow due to incorrect handling of user authentication credentials.'"

Comments

Best Practices 101

[b0r1s]

It's been pretty standard to ACL off authentication methods from unknown or untrusted networks for some time.

If you can only auth from a known network, then an overrun in that auth process still requires access to a restricted location, which will stop 99% of attacks (which are usually automated these days).

Re:The Cisco Advisory

[bladesjester]

You'd be amazed at the things that you'll screw up on code-wise during a crunch period when you've been up for days on end trying to meet the deadlines that the pointy-hairs have set for you.

We're still human in theory at least, so mistakes will happen and in a piece of software that's *that* big, it's really easy to miss them.