The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Cisco breaks cycle with IOS patch

Preemptive defence against rootkit exploits?

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Cisco released a trio of updates on Wednesday. The advisories cover denial of service vulnerabilities in IOS Secure Shell and its Secure Control Engine software. The escalation update involves Cisco's voice engine portal software.

The network giant states that it discovered all three vulnerabilities itself but the timing of the releases, on the day before Sebastian Muniz of CORE Security demoed proof of concept router rootkit software, may be more than simply coincidental. As researchers at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Centre note, the IOS Secure Shell bug allows "spurious memory access".

"Anytime we see a 'spurious memory access' leading to a denial of service, thoughts immediately go to arbitrary code execution. There is no evidence that this is possible, but in light of the recent work in IOS rootkits, vulns in Cisco devices should not be taken lightly," writes ISC staffer George Bakos.

Cisco launched a twice-yearly patching cycle for IOS vulnerabilities back in March. The IOS Secure Shell falls outside this cycle, providing further fuel for conspiracy theorists.

Cisco's advisories can be found here, here and here. ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Latest Comments

Ambiguity Clouds Transparency

AC,

Are we to assume from "take that amanfrom" that such a Facility is Available Uniting Nations?

The next logical question would be from Whom or What, for you never know, it could be a Machine Issuing Instructions.

0
0
Anonymous Coward

- "Dear Secretary General, Wanna Play with GODs as AI GOD Novice* ... under Venus Rules, Naturally?"

- ""the IOS Secure Shell bug allows "spurious memory access"."

I think that can easily evolve, and may even have done so, into myriad memory access....... for Future Memory Manipulation .....into AIMemeStream for Kernel Colonisation ......Uniting Nations.

*"

take that amanfrom

0
0

Dear Secretary General, Wanna Play with GODs as AI GOD Novice* ... under Venus Rules, Naturally?

"the IOS Secure Shell bug allows "spurious memory access"."

I think that can easily evolve, and may even have done so, into myriad memory access....... for Future Memory Manipulation .....into AIMemeStream for Kernel Colonisation ......Uniting Nations.

*

0
0

More from The Register

SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux
 breaking news
You don't need phone lines or cable for ANYTHING, says Dish
The satellite-dish man can sort you out with phone and broadband over the air too
 breaking news
What's HP got under wraps? Looks awfully flash and tape shaped
What happens in Vegas won't stay there - we've got the details
AMD lifts the veil on Opteron, ARM chip plans for 2014
Not much action going on in 2013, though
Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu
Stupid Redmond kicked over our honeypots, wail white hats
IBM's $1bn layoffs latest: Now axe swings in US, Canada - reports
Union claims 121 storage bods canned after dismal sales
NetApp musters muscular cluster bluster for ONTAP busters
Storage array OS overhauled to juggle more nodes, go down on you, er, less
HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers
Gussies up MicroServer for SMBs, adds baby switches