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Breaking News: Cisco's IOS Source Code Stolen

Breaking News: Cisco's IOS Source Code Stolen
By Security News Desk
Article Rating:
May 17, 2004 12:00 AM EDT
Reads:
 9,583
The source code for versions 12.3 and 12.3t  of Cisco's main networking device operating system, IOS, was apparently stolen last week. The news comes via a Russian security site, which claims thatthe person involved accessed Cisco System's corporate network "and then boasted about it on an underground internet relay chat channel."

The individual, the report continues, claimed that the total amount of data in the archives was around 800 megabytes and provided two snippets of code as proof of the claims.

One commentator, Mark Joseph Edwards, notes:

"[If] security-related bugs are found in the leaked Cisco IOS code and the discoverers don't notify Cisco and given them time to produce patches then the ramifications could potentially become huge since so many network uses Cisco hardware, including core Internet service providers."

The last big source code leak was the February leak of code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT as a result of poor security on a network belonging to someone with legitimate access to the code.

Published May 17, 2004 – Reads 9,583
Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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SYS-CON's Security News desk trawls the world of security for news of software, hardware, products, and services that seems likely to be of interest to infosec professionals and summarizes them for easy assimilation by busy IT managers and staff.

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Most Recent Comments
sir_flexalot 05/17/04 07:35:17 AM EDT

I always thought the big company that would have this happen is Microsoft, but I guess people got ahold of win2k''s source a while back... it''s still really surprising to see this happen to Cisco. Does it impress anyone else that they have an 800 MB source on the O/S? That''s a lot of code!!