Lab Notes

The Black Hat conference session on hacking Cisco routers that Cisco wanted to cancel has happened, despite their efforts. Now they, along with ISS, are filing a restraining order to keep further details of the hack from leaking out.

Apparently, the topic of the conference session was not a generic how-to about buffer overflows and the like, but the discussion of a specific flaw in Cisco IOS that "could bring the internet to its knees." The speaker, Michael Lynn, quit security research firm ISS rather than be told that he could not give the talk. Now he's facing the full force of Cisco's legal department.