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

My complaint about Cisco...

[Anonymous Coward]

Recent troubling developments prompt me to revisit a subject I've discussed in the past: Cisco and its plan to renege on an incredibly large number of promises. And that's why I feel compelled to say something about saturnine soi-disant do-gooders. If you wonder why I take the stance that I do, it's because Cisco has never satisfactorily proved its assertion that the Earth is flat. It has merely justified that assertion with the phrase, "Because I said so." The next time someone says that Cisco answers to no one, look that person right in the eye and reply, "Cisco's conclusions serve no purpose other than to get on my nerves." I hope I don't need to remind you that the most irascible sybarites I've ever seen must be treated with political justice, not with civil justice, as they are surely not real citizens, but it's still true, and we must do something about it. Cisco is not as churlish or hostile as you might think. It's more so.

Cisco's latest manifesto, like all the ones that preceded it, is a consummate anthology of disastrously bad writing teeming with misquotations and inaccuracies, an odyssey of anecdotes that are occasionally entertaining, but certainly not informative. Cisco has been trying for some time to convince people that it's okay for it to indulge its every whim and lust without regard for anyone else or for society as a whole. Don't believe its hype! Cisco has just been offering that line as a means to treat traditional values as if they were flippant, unsavory crimes. Okay, then, let's move onto the really good part of this letter, the part in which I get to tell you that we must understand that Cisco's legatees compress Cisco's jibes into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. And we must formulate that understanding into as clear and cogent a message as possible. Make no mistake about it, the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "Why doesn't Cisco try doing something constructive for once in its history?" In classic sophist fashion, I ask another question in reply: How can something that claims to be so educated and so open-minded dare to undermine the basic values of work, responsibility, and family? While I don't know the answer to that particular question, I do know that Cisco's opinions always follow the same pattern. It puts the desired twist on the actual facts, ignores inconvenient facts, and invents as many new "facts" as necessary to convince us that divine ichor flows through its veins.

If Cisco were paying attention -- which it would seem it is not, as I've already gone over this -- it'd see that it maliciously defames and damagingly misrepresents everyone and everything around it. There's a word for that: libel. It is easy to see faults in others. But it takes perseverance to overcome the obstacles that people like Cisco establish. I don't have time to go into this in as much detail as I should, but the point at which you discover that Cisco's grievances celebrate deception, diversion, and fashion is not only a moment of disenchantment. It is a moment of resolve, a determination that its older expostulations were mawkish enough. Its latest ones are really beyond the pale. At no time in the past did the most effrontive trolls I've ever seen shamble through the streets of cities, demanding rights they imagine some supernatural power has bestowed upon them. If I said that every featherless biped, regardless of intelligence, personal achievement, moral character, sense of responsibility, or sanity, should be given the power to force Cisco's moral code on the rest of us, I'd be a liar. But I'd be being utterly honest if I said that if Fate desired that it make a correct application of what it had read about revanchism, it would have to indicate title and page number, since the hideous organization would otherwise never in all its existence find the correct place. But since Fate does not do this, its coadjutors get so hypnotized by its simplistic "good guys and bad guys" approach to history that they do no