By the way that article reads, I would guess the attack was not exceptionally sophisticated. (Everyone's definition of sophisticated is different). If one removed the config-reg (or renamed it) function on a small Cisco's firmware one could quite effectively change the passwords and make it difficult for a not very technical group of admins to take it back. Since there is talk about moving their main router behind a firewall, my guess is that they are using a routing appliance rather than any sophisticated routing hardware. The $18,000 replacement is probably for a different vendor, not because the hardware has lost function. This is all wild conjecture because I haven't seen any alerts from vendors in their normal channels. :) Deepak Jain AiNET On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Kai Schlichting wrote:
If we assume that the router mentioned in the following cracking incident is a popular model we all use: what other than zapping the FlashROM could this attacker have done? We all know that <big popular vendor>'s firmware source code has hit the pirate BBS's a year or two back : could someone have compiled a rogue image that can actually fry some router components (I can think of plenty of nasty things with serial ports transmitting too fast for their own good - and burn the driver chips) ?