Week 6: Cisco Device Backdoors

Cisco is a widely known and accepted company that specializes in advanced networking equipment. They manufacture equipment for small, medium, and large businesses as well as internet service providers. They have recently removed several backdoor accounts from their small business line of networking devices. They stated that these accounts were present for diagnostic and manufacturing purposes. This is reasonable, but the amount they have removed is somewhat unsettling. This is especially so with the conspiracies of NSA forcing them to install backdoors for law enforcement use. It is unclear if any still remain in the products, but it is interesting to note that these backdoors have only been discovered in small business devices so far. Because the Cisco IOS is closed-source, it cannot be audited by the general public, therefore we won’t know the full extent of how the operating system functions and if there are more security flaws. For now, at least they are heading in the right direction by patching their devices to increase security. For those concerned, open-source software and hardware based networking solutions may be worth researching and implementing.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cisco-removed-its-seventh-backdoor-account-this-year-and-thats-a-good-thing/