A security vendor is questioning whether the IOS FTP Server vulnerabilities Cisco reported on May 9 may constitute an intentionally planted backdoor, as opposed to a series of programming errors that inadvertently led to a backdoor.
Chris Eng, director of security services at Veracode, is suggesting that possibility given that a remote attacker would need one of the flaws—improper authorization checking in IOS FTP—in order to exploit the second flaw—an IOS reload when transferring files via FTP.