Thread, Slashdot reporting theft of Cisco IOS IP in Russia !
Yikes
Come on, this stuff needs to stop. When is the USA government going to get super serious about protecting our IP through enforcement and prosecution? This gets really old.
slashdot.org
Possible Cisco Source Code Theft
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday May 16, @09:09AM
from the gotta-hate-when-that-happens dept.
OmegaBlac writes "According to Ars Technica, a Russian security site is claiming that Cisco's corporate network was comprimised and about 800MB of Cisco's source code for IOS Operating System version 12.3 was stolen. I guess Cisco forgot to implement their own Self Defending Network solutions."
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Universities and corporations *really* needs to make sure CS/Eng/ECE students are better trained in protecting themselves from security break-ins and corporate espionage.
On a related topic, in the year 2000, Silicon Valley had a spy ring of foreign "art students" (who actually were trained engineers, not art students) that were aggressively barging into a military related area seeking the dimensions of the building, names, positions, & purpose of the premise, and other profiling information - questions that were most unusual for people claiming to sell artwork (art work that was actually recognized to be from the local mall). They visited my startup (we are by military contract firms), and they asked similar profiling questions to me and our product manager and attempted to gain information about our technology, building dimensions (spooky), layout of building offices, names, purpose of building. One of them even tried to barge right through me to get to the back offices (because we wouldn't tell him what we do nor what was back there when he asked - I had explained we were still in "stealth" mode, the phrase triggered such a strange reaction out of him) - I actually had to physically block the guy. It was a very intimidating situation. Next day, some of our PCs were turned on when we got in the morning. One can only hope the USA govt had simply outsourced their intelligence work to this particular country.
Never ever let your portfolio startups have a location next door to military stuff, even if it's low-rent area. It's definitely not worth the unwanted, surprise visits from foreign govts.
We also had an attempted visit from members of the Chinese govt (and this one fake Chinese VC firm that everyone in the Valley knows is a front), but they (fortunately) were much easier to block from visiting (and very politely accepted our rebuke, unlike the so-called art students who tried to find out everything on our comm startup). Chinese espionage is much more gentler and politer than the aggressive espionage by the so-called 'art' students that happened to come from Israel.
Engineering schools do not even come close to adequately preparing workers for such bizarre things like corporate or foreign espionage.
We now have video surveillance all over the place - even to the parking lot and road. Silicon Valley has espionage galore. It's probably going to get much, much worse, now that companies have offshored technology.
We are truly naive and overly trusting - our schools don't even teach us about this stuff or caution us. I was extremely naive initially until those incidents happened at our startup.
Regards,
Amy J |
