Cisco Routers Again Take Hacker Spotlight, ou la légèreté du géant des communications IP face aux menaces qui pèsent sur ses routeurs - par Robert McMillan, CIO.com.

Moss believes that economics may have driven some Cisco researchers underground. Any code that exploits Cisco vulnerabilities is so prized that any hacker who chooses to disclose his findings, rather than sell them to a security company or government agency, is often giving up a lot of money, Moss said. Mike Lynn's vulnerability was worth about US$250,000, he reckons.

But this year things have opened up. Black Hat organizers plan three talks on Cisco routers and the Internetwork Operating System that they run. "All of a sudden this year a lot of stuff has been breaking loose," Moss said.

Lately, with Microsoft Windows no longer the fertile ground for bug hunting that it once was, researchers are looking at other products to hack. And Cisco's routers are an interesting target. They command more than 60 percent of the router market, according to research firm IDC.

"If you own the network, you own the company," said Nicolas Fischbach, senior manager of network engineering and security with COLT Telecom, a European data service provider. "Owning the Windows PC is not really a priority anymore."

But Cisco's routers make a harder target than Windows. They're not as well-known to hackers and they come in many configurations, so an attack on one router might fail on a second. Another difference is that Cisco administrators are not constantly downloading and running software.

Finally, Cisco has done a lot of work in recent years to cut down on the number of attacks that can be launched against its routers from the Internet, according to Fischbach. "All the basic, really easy exploits you could use against network services are really gone," he said. The risk of having a well-configured router hacked by someone from outside of your corporate network is "really low."

That hasn't deterred the latest crop of security researchers.

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