Fergie's Tech Blog

Cisco Gear Hackable, Net Security Risk Rises

Gregg Keizer writes in TechWeb News:

Cisco on Wednesday confirmed that routers and other devices running the newest versions of its IOS (Internetwork Operating System) are vulnerable to serious attack.

The San Jose, Calif.-based network hardware maker published a security advisory and recommended that users either upgrade to alternate editions or install fixed versions of IOS.

For its part, security giant Symantec immediately raised its overall Internet threat to "Level 2" from "1" earlier in the day. The last time Symantec had its threat set to "2" was during the Zotob attacks of August.

The flaw is in the Firewall Authentication Proxy for FTP and/or Telnet Sessions in later versions of IOS -- 12.2 through 12.4 -- and might result in either a denial-of-service (DoS) attack which would likely bring down the device or possibly a more dangerous scenario, where the attacker gains complete control of the device. Or both.

posted by Fergie @ 9/07/2005 12:49:00 PM