Cisco ships Mexican drug runner music on VPN CD

Bootleg bootup CD features Narco Corridos tune

By John Leyden, 9th October 2008

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A sysadmin looking to set up a VPN network was surprised to discover that a Cisco installation CD contained Mexican music instead of security software. Cisco has acknowledged the issue and said that affected customers will be offered replacement CDs.

Instead of the intended software, some CDs shipped to Cisco customers featured 12 tracks of Mexican music, including Narco Corridos tunes from Diego 'El Compa' Rivas. Narco Corridos songs often celebrate drug running, and are popular in northern Mexico but derided by some as a "cancer that is killing Mexican music".

The tracks seem to be poor-quality bootleg remixes of the sort typically created by wannabe DJs, and how these MP3s got onto software installation CDs is unclear. Perhaps somebody in a factory making the CDs pressed the wrong button on a production line computer that had also been used for illegal downloads.

Blogger Dave Fumberger, who experienced the issue at work, writes about the incident in a posting here.

Cisco responded with a post saying that affected customers will receive replacement software. The networking giant's reply confirms that counterfeit networking kit or CDs were not involved in the issue without really explaining what happened in the first place.

Cisco is aware that some customers have received defective VPN Client CDs as part of recent orders.
Manufacturing is aware of this problem and is actively reshipping new media to impacted customers.

Defective VPN Client CDs can be identified by the following marking on the back of the media which ends in "MX21511/4"

The incident follows another strange occurrence involving Cisco two weeks ago, when lower case ts temporarily disappeared from the networking giant's homepage. ®

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