A security researcher who earned fame by quitting his job to present a speech on the security shortcomings of Cisco's networking kit at this year's Black Hat conference has secured a job at Cisco chief rival, Juniper Networks. Michael Lynn will join Juniper in unspecified capacity, according to reports.

Lynn gained the respect and attention of the security community by resigning from his former employer ISS so that he could present a talk on how it might be possible to run hostile code on Cisco routers, which until July were thought to be safe from such exploits. Cisco and ISS subsequently obtained a court order preventing Lynn from further publicising his research, a move slated by critics as censorship.

Cisco said it was acting in defence of its customers and according to established principles about the disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Last week the networking giant outlined security updates that followed a detailed investigation by the networking giant of security weaknesses highlighted by Lynn. ®

Related stories

• Cisco breaks cycle with IOS patch (22 May 2008)
• Cisco to get API-happy (17 December 2007)
• Zero-day sales not 'fair' - to researchers (3 June 2007)
• Network security vulns keep sysadmins busy (23 May 2007)
• Cisco squishes bug trio (25 January 2007)
• Symantec and Juniper to snoop networks together (12 September 2006)
• Sendmail flaw poses critical hacker risk (23 March 2006)
• Cisco’s AON: Jeeves in a router or a box of evils? (3 December 2005)
• CMP Media dons Black Hat (17 November 2005)
• In brief Juniper gets Funky (14 November 2005)
• Cisco misses the Street (10 November 2005)
• Cisco protects routers against 'Black Hat' bug (3 November 2005)
• Exploit writers team up to target Cisco routers (2 August 2005)
• Cisco details Black Hat vuln fix (1 August 2005)
• Settlement reached in Cisco flaw dispute (29 July 2005)
• Cisco, ISS file suit against rogue researcher (28 July 2005)