Cisco cover up

Wed Jul 27 20:56:01 UTC 2005

On Jul 27, 2005, at 4:48 PM, J. Oquendo wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Dan Hollis wrote:
>
>> This is looking like a complete PR disaster for cisco. They would  
>> have
>> been better off allowing the talk to take place, and actually  
>> fixing the
>> holes rather than wasting money on a small army of razorblade- 
>> equipped
>> censors.
>
> Complete PR disaster? Maybe they're still working on the fix and  
> didn't
> want those on the blackhat scene to have a glimpse of how they  
> intended on
> fixing things. I wonder if this has exploit_foo_bar has anything to do
> with their code being stolen earlier this year was it, or late last  
> year.
> Maybe for the geeks in you, it may be a PR disaster, but I doubt their
> stock price will come down much. Oddly I wonder if those in gov are
> watching closely to those who are running around shorting Cisco  
> stock. Or
> should that be: "sh0rt1ng c1sc0 st0ck!@$"

Cisco had initially approved this talk. My understanding is that this  
has been fixed and no current IOS images were vulnerable to the  
techniques he was describing. ISS, Lynn, and Cisco had been working  
together for months on this issue before the talk.

This had _nothing_ to do with the source code that was stolen. I have  
dealt with Lynn professionally on many occasions and he has shown  
himself to have more than a fair share of  integrity. It is uncalled  
for to take to disparate events and place them together in a way  
which smudges the name of a respected researcher.