Lynn felt compelled to quit his job Wednesday morning so that he could give the talk because the Cisco security issues are of vital importance to the Internet's health. "This is the right thing to do," he said, speaking Wednesday to Black Hat attendees, who punctuated his talk with applause. "When you attack the router, you gain control of the network."
Lynn described a now-patched flaw in the Internetwork Operating System (IOS) software used to power Cisco's routers, and to describe the steps he used to gain control of a router. Although Cisco was informed of the flaw by ISS, and patched its firmware in April, users running older versions of the company's software are at risk, he said.

Computerworld | ISS researcher quits job to detail Cisco flaws

A presentation called “The Holy Grail: Cisco IOS Shellcode Remote Execution” was slated to run at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas this week. But Internet Information Systems and Cisco, the companies presenting the segment, decided to pull the presentation after discussions between the two firms.

As noted in my previous meme, Lynn did wind up giving his talk. Although he had to resign from ISS to do so.

According to Jeff Moss, CEO of the Black Hat Conference, Cisco on Monday said it would go to court for a restraining order to stop Black Hat from distributing materials on the IOS presentation already submitted by ISS and Cisco and published in the 1,000-page conference program. Moss said that Cisco supplied personnel, with razorblades in hand, to cut out 15 pages of material from 2,500 Black Hat conference show guides that detailed the company’s research.

No word if Cisco or ISS is going to attempt any legal action against Lynn.

According to a rumor circulating at the conference this week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was involved in asking Cisco and ISS to change its findings for security reasons. Cisco and ISS deny DHS involvement.

"Several agencies" have been in contact with Lynn regarding his research.

Network World | Cisco nixes conference session on hacking IOS router code

Wired just posted the best article so far.. Here are some of the highlights:

Lynn likened IOS to Windows XP, for its ubiquity.

"But when there is a Windows XP bug, it's not really a big deal," Lynn said. "You can still ship (data through a network) because the routers will transmit (it). How do you ship (data) when the routers are dead?"

"Can anyone think why you would steal (the source code) if not to hack it?" Lynn asked the audience, noting that it took him six months to develop an attack to exploit the bug. "I'm probably about to be sued to oblivion. (But) the worst thing is to keep this stuff secret."

"There are people out there looking for it, there are people who have probably found it who could be using it against either national infrastructure or any enterprise," said Ali-Reza Anghaie, a senior security engineer with an aerospace firm, who was in the audience.

During his talk, Lynn demonstrated an attack in real time using his own router, but did not allow the audience to see the steps. The attack took less than a minute to execute.

"In large part I had to quit to give this presentation because ISS and Cisco would rather the world be at risk, I guess," Lynn said. "They had to do what's right for their shareholders; I understand that. But I figured I needed to do what's right for the country and for the national critical infrastructure."

Wired News: Cisco Security Hole a Whopper

Security experts view Black Hat as the premier event to discuss and explore Internet vulnerabilities. At this year’s event, Michael Lynn, a member of ISS’ X-Force R&D team, gave a talk Wednesday on vulnerabilities in Cisco’s IOS, but he did so only after resigning from ISS, according to a company spokesperson.

Lynn is MemeStreams user abaddon.

Cisco’s statement added that Lynn’s presentation was not a disclosure of a new vulnerability or a flaw with Cisco IOS software, but an exploration of “ways to expand exploitations of existing security vulnerabilities impacting routers.”

Cisco PR is spinning at top speed right now. Lynn did infact demonstrate the remote injection of shellcode to a Cisco router. Lynn is able to make a Cisco router connect back to his attack host with an enable shell. For those unfamilar with Cisco routers, that basically means its possible to hack the router and get full control of it. This is not a DoS attack. This is a full on compromise.

This is basically the bug that could be used to take down the Internet. No bullshit.

Abaddon Drops The Bomb on Cisco

I just wanted to say that I passed my second qualification exam (oral exam) on Tuesday, and am now officially a PhD candidate. Yay!

This looks pretty rad - Nano

This paper by Steven Huybrechts won the National Defense University President's Award for Excellence in Writing in 2004. It's an interesting fusion of influences, many of which may be familiar to the MemeStreams community.

In a sentence, the basic message is that human genetics precludes world government.

Perhaps the best way to encourage you to read the paper is to highlight some of the footnotes.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976.
Plato: "only the dead have seen the end of war."
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
The National Security Strategy of the United States
The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue (JSTOR subscription required)
Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell (New York: Perennial, 2003).
Robert Upshall, Antibiotic Resistance (United Kingdom: Whinfield, May 1998).
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. (article), (chapter 1).
Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees
Robert Kagan, America's Crisis of Legitimacy, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004, 65-87.
Sisterhood is hungry: An egalitarian society of ants, The Economist, 23 August 1997
Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
Alison George, "March of the Superbugs," New Scientist, 19 July 2003, S1.
Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994.
Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Errol Morris, The Fog of War. Sony Pictures Classics, 2003.
Joshua Blu Buhs, The Fire Ant Wars, 2004.
Natalie Angier, "Is War Our Biological Destiny?" New York Times, 11 November 2003.

The Biology of Conflict [PDF]

An interesting approach to solving pollution

For $160 you can turn a Hummer H2 into a zero-emissions vehicle. No tools or mechanical ability are required.

CNN.com - Buy off your 'car guilt' - Jun 21, 2005

[I especially liked "Your manias become science"....anyone know where I can get a print of that? It would go wonderfully in the lab:) - Nano]

If you liked PostSecret, you may also like Barbara Kruger. Here's a description from a gallery of Barbara Kruger's work:

The juxtaposition of word and image in Barbara Kruger's highly recognizable work is derived from twelve years as a designer and photo editor for Conde Nast publications. Short, pithy caption-like copy is scattered over fragmented and enlarged photographs appropriated from various media. Usually declarative or accusatory in tone, these phrases posit an opposition between the pronouns "you" and "we," which satirically refer to "men" and "women." These humorous works suspend the viewer between the fascination of the image and the indictment of the text while reminding us that language and its use within culture to construct and maintina proverbs, jobs, jokes, myths, and history reinforce the interests and perspective of those who control it.

There's another gallery:

Barbara Kruger's on going project is to provoke questions about power and its effect on the human condition: to investigate the way power is constructed, used and abused. In her works, which have become the demonstrative visual icons of the 1980s and 1990s, power is interrogated and interpreted through the social, economic and political arrangements which motor the life impulses of love, hate, sex and death.

Kruger was also featured in the PBS documentary art:21.

It's our pleasure to disgust you is in the permanent collection at MOCA in Los Angeles.

In 2000, some of her art was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Here are some prints from the gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum:

We, Longer, Heard, Seen, And, No, Not, Be

A Slate article from July 2000 begins:

Barbara Kruger comes as close as anybody can to being the official artist of American consumerism.

An interview with Barbara Kruger:

By using familiar images and text from modern advertising, Kruger forcefully exposes the misleading and aggressive lies of pop media. Her works involve humor and irony, though they are often disturbing at the same time. Kruger gained her "fluency and comfort with pictures and words" from working as a graphic designer for magazines before she became an artist in the mid-'80s.

Barbara Kruger

] Reenie's head chip woke her by steadily increasing
] the perceived volume of a song by a British comedy
] troupe. Lots of trippy dreams last night. She
] couldn't remember them all this morning, but she was
] sure they were cool. She rolled out of bed and prepared
] for her "Commute" to the adjoining room. Reenie
] loved her job, well, as much as she could love any job.
] She got to work from home as much as she liked.

If you liked "Ownz0red" by Cory Doctorow, which many of you did, you will definitely like this quick little 10 minute read.

Futurismic: Fiction

Here is a strange site. Sometimes funny sometimes sad. People send in their secrets on postcards they have made. Check it out.

PostSecret