Cisco security under attack at Black Hat/DefCon

Security in Cisco gear will be under scrunity next week as security researchers put Cisco security through its paces at Black Hat/DefCon. WLAN IPS vendor AirTight Networks will show how  it's possible with some implementations of 802.11w in vendor equipment to conjure up an attack that hits WLAN access points with malformed packets, not bringing them down but triggering a disconnection response in their WLAN clients, writes Ellen Messmer in Network World.

Some of the WLAN equipment that will be shown to be vulnerable to this attack includes that of D-Link, Cisco, Buffalo and open source Madwifi. Either these vendors aren't implementing 802.11w correctly or the standard will need to be improved to prevent the "autoimmune disorder" in WLANs, according to AirTight.

Meanwhile, Core Security Technologies is expected to show how it's possible to install a rootkit on the Cisco IOS. The Cisco IOS rootkit would give an attacker the ability to do things such as change how traffic passes through a Cisco device.

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