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Juniper Snatches Man In Black Hat
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-11-07
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The Cisco annoyance and Black Hat hacker Michael Lynn joined the kids over at Juniper Networks. Lynn got some grief back during the summer when he exposed major flaws in Cisco's routers at the Black Hat Briefings Conference in Las Vegas.
 | | Juniper Gets the Black Hat Hacker |  |
At the time, Lynn ticked off his employer, Internet Security Systems (ISS), by revealing the flaw and they subsequently fired him. Then ISS and Cisco both sued him.
All the damage centered on Lynn's presentation at the conference. The now famous/notorious presentation discussed a potential flaw in Cisco's Internetwork Operating System (IOS). This is Cisco's OS of choice for most of the their routers. The problem was a heap-overflow issue with IOS and if exploited could cause nasty problems because a lot of ISPs use Cisco routers. It could do severe damage to the Internet itself.
At the time, they hadn't developed a patch to repair the problem. The finally released the patch last week. Lynn said he was just trying to help people against potential threats. ISS and Cisco didn't see it that way. One can only assume Juniper does.
Cisco took the case to court to prevent any information about the vulnerability to be disclosed. Lynn couldn't talk about what was in the presentation as a result of the court decision.
Eweek quoted Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of CounterPane Security Inc., saying that Juniper may have picked the right man for the job, even if Lynn is a former hacker.
"Smart companies hire the best person for a job," said Schneier in the article. "Sometimes the best person for the job is a former hacker. And sometimes the best person for a job is someone who stood up for what's right against some pretty big companies."
In any event, this should keep things entertaining. Many felt Lynn would have problems finding a job after he went against his initial agreement with both Cisco and ISS.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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