Could Enterasys be looking at acquiring rival Extreme Networks? There's been a flurry of speculation on that this week. Enterasys has made no bones about its intention to acquire a sizable company that will take it close to $1 billion in annual revenue and let it better compete with Cisco and new enterprise LAN switch entrant Juniper Networks. Extreme and Enterasys both do about $350 million in yearly sales. Extreme would come at a bargain. Its market cap is about $374 million and it has $231 million in cash, making the net investment less than $150 million. Product overlap would be significant, however. Both companies compete in the $18 billion enterprise Ethernet switching market but are struggling to compete with Cisco's dominant 72% share.
If you build it, they will come. So hold onto your hats now that the world has its first ever Cisco router rootkit, reports a story from IDG News Service. Sebastian Muniz, a 
researcher with Core Security Technologies, developed the rootkit for Cisco's Internetwork Operating System and will show it off on May 22 at the EuSecWest conference in London. Rootkits are stealth programs, extremely hard to detect. For the most part, they are aimed at Windows. They are typically used to capture desktops and servers for botnets, or to embed keylogging code or spyware. (Although, as the story points out, Sony BMG Music was perhaps the most notorious rootkit. The company built it for DRM, to stop unauthorized CD copying). Rootkits are a favorite of the financially motivated criminal hacker, experts say. But now a rootkit can be placed on a router. What kinds of use can such a thing accomplish? Will it be an easier way to gather multitudes of passwords stored in configuration files? No doubt now that rootkits have been proven for IOS, the world will soon find out. Hackers are nothing if not creative.
Cisco Security Advisory: On May 14 Cisco issued a security advisory for Cisco Unified Communications Manager (formerly 
Cisco CallManager). Patches are now available to fix four denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities all of which were discovered internally by Cisco, the company says. The following Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) services are affected: Certificate Trust List (CTL) Provider, Certificate Authority Proxy Function (CAPF), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Trap.
I was poking around Ning , the social network site co-founded by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame, and noticed that the Cisco community has embraced Ning. The site's shtick is that you can build your own Facebook on Ning, keeping out the general riffraff that might encroach on a more general social network site like that. Among the Cisco-oriented groups on Ning:
Considering counterfeit Cisco gear05/13/08Yesterday, Dan Sallach posted an interesting commentary on counterfeit Cisco gear on his Freedom to Tinker blog. He 
quotes a New York Times story published on Friday that says a two-year FBI investigation unearthed about 3500 counterfeit Cisco components (worth $3.5M). (Click here for a similar story on Network World.) The gear isn't particularly well-made (as counterfeits are wont to be), but the really interesting part is that there also was no evidence found of a secret hacker back door or other malicious code in the gear either. Poor performance is one fear over counterfeits, but Trojans is really the Big Worry. Various proof-of-concept attacks have been done that show how secretly embedded code could be activated, give the hacker control of the device (to launch DDoS attacks, for instance) and be nearly impossible to for the poor bamboozled user to detect. It's enough to give the shivers to network executives everywhere.
The FBI is freaking out over the fact that the U.S. Department of Defense has been sold counterfeit Cisco gear. The concern isn't so much over whether Cisco is getting the 
revenue it deserves - it's more about the possibility that hackers could be embedding backdoors into the counterfeit gear to allow them access into U.S. military networks at a later date. In a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the FBI indicates that it has discovered counterfeit Cisco 1000 and 2000 Series routers, Catalyst 4000 Series switches, Gigabit Interface Converters and WAN interface cards that have been sold to the DoD.
The departure of Jayshree Ullal this week is another indicator of Cisco's transformation from a networking company in to an
IT company, according to one analyst. The recent exodus of top executives from Cisco - Ullal follows Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo and Senior Vice President Mike Volpi out the door, both of whom were considered potential successors to CEO John Chambers -- is due to a number of obvious factors: hitting the career ceiling, cashing out on a flat stock price, and professional inertia among them. But a less apparent cause may be a philosophical change within the company itself.
Cisco lost another long-term top executive today. Jayshree Ullal, SVP, Data Center, Switching & Services announced on her blog that she had resigned. She wrote:
New Cisco TelePresence unit gets personal05/12/08Desktop videoconferencing has arrived at last -- or at least Cisco hopes it has. The company on Monday announced a version of its 
increasingly popular TelePresence system for use in individual offices: the TelePresence System 500. At the same time, the company thinks bigger can be better, too. It announced the TelePresence System 3200, which does a one-up on the six-person 3000, tripling the room capacity by adding a second row of seating at its so-called "virtual table." The other TelePresence family member, the 1000, is geared for a meeting with four-people -- two on screen, and two at the virtual table (though, like all the TelePresence units, can support multiple locations on a single call). The TelePresence System 500 is priced at $33,900, less than half of the 1000, reports Reuters.
FBI criminal investigation: Cisco routers"At the request of another federal government agency, on January 11, 2008, the FBI's Cyber Division provided an unclassified PowerPoint presentation and briefing on efforts to counter the production and ...Read more
Brad Reese is research manager at BradReese.Com, advancing the careers of 1 million certified individuals in the growing Cisco Career Certification Program.
2008 Resolutions – Where are You? (Surveys)Bad, bad Wendell. Zero progress on my cert goals this year. How about you? Back in January, I posted about our collective new year's resolutions regarding certification. We had a pretty ...Read more
Wendell Odom, CCIE No, 1624, splits time between writing books for Cisco Press and teaching classes for Skyline ATS. His books include titles on QoS, CCIE R/S, as well as several titles related to CCNA certification, including his newest book Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802) (Read a sneak peek of chapter 7). Follow Wendell's blog here. More free chapters from other Cisco Press books here.
The Best Way to Get the Message Across....Despite all the newstories, blogs, and speaches about the forthcoming Interent problems because of IPv4 shortage and the lack of enthusiam for IPv6, the message just isn't getting across. ...Read more
Morris is a Technical Team Lead and Network Architect at a $3 billion high-tech company. His background is in enterprise WANs working with telcos, and developing large-scale routing designs.
IPv6 at the 2008 OlympicsIn my previous post I threw out a few thoughts about the idea of enticing users to switch to IPv6 – a sort of variation on the long-running “we ...Read more
Jeff is president of Jeff Doyle and Associates, an IP networking consultancy, and author of Routing TCP/IP, Volumes I (read an excerpt) and II. Read the transcript of our live online text chat with Jeff entitled "IPv6: Will matter to the enterprise in five years."
Audit and lockdown your Cisco routers quickly using Router and Security Device Manager90+% of Cisco Router administrators are CLI jockeys, myself included. However, there are several GUI tools that can help you manage and secure your Cisco routers very quickly. ...Read more
Jamey Heary, CCIE No. 7680, is a security consulting systems engineer at Cisco. Jamey is the author of Cisco NAC Appliance: Enforcing Host Security with Clean Access. Read a chapter from the book here. Follow Jamey's blog here. More free chapters from other Cisco Press books here.
Full HD Video Conferencing in your backpack?Full HD Video Conferencing in your backpack? It is really hard to believe that you can have full high definition video conferencing in your backpack and traveling every day. But it ...Read more
Larry Chaffin, Ph.D, is the CEO/chairman and founder of Pluto Networks a consulting company specializing in VoIP, WLAN and security. He is also author of a number of books including Managing Cisco Secure Networks, Skype Me, Practical VOIP Security, and Configuring Check Point NGX VPN-1/Firewall-1.
Cisco SmartCare Examined The most interesting thing about Cisco’s new SmartCare announcement (see lead story) is not the fact that it can help prevent network outages before they emerge. It’s the way that ...Read more
Ken Presti is president of Presti Research & Consulting, Inc., which specializes in go-to-market strategies for technology vendors and service providers.
CCIE Voice/CCVP Objectives #3: Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP)A telephony protocol that features prominently in the CCIE Voice and CCVP exam blueprints (as well as the real world!) is the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP). MGCP is a ...Read more
Mark Lewis (CCIE#6280) is an independent consultant who helps service provider and large enterprise clients design and implement leading-edge technologies. Mark has designed and implemented a variety of large-scale technology solutions including VPN, MPLS, QoS, data center, and IP telephony. Mark is the author of Comparing, Designing, and Deploying VPNs; Troubleshooting Virtual Private Networks; and CCIE Voice Exam Quick Reference Sheets.
GNS3 - The Emulator to End All SimulatorsWhile we're talking about building a home lab, let's talk about the cheapest home lab ever...That'd be FREE. A group of guys from France have put together a Cisco emulator ...Read more
Jeremy D. Cioara, CCIE No. 11727, is the owner of AdTEC Networks, an IT consulting firm. We've got 15 copies of his new book CCNA Practice Questions (Exam 640-802), 3rd Edition, up for grabs. Go here for details on how to win a copy. Go here for a sneak peek of a chapter.
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Four holes in Cisco Unified Communications Manager
Cisco has issued a security advisory for Cisco Unified Communications Manager (formerly Cisco CallManager). Patches are now available to fix four denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities all of which were discovered internally by Cisco, the company says. The following services are affected: Certificate Trust List (CTL) Provider, Certificate Authority Proxy Function (CAPF), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Trap. READ MORE.
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Cisco has launched a support wiki for partners and customers to share their knowledge of Cisco gear on top of Cisco documents. According to Cisco: "This augmentation of knowledge gives our user community a medium to share knowledge and improve their overall effectiveness."
VIDEORob Salvagno, senior director of Business Development, discusses Cisco's Nuova acquisition, a follow-on to Cisco's initial investment in August 2006. Nuova's first product is the Nexus 5000.
VIDEOJapan's NTT Group deploys new Cisco ASR 1000 Series routers to deliver advanced services. (3:54)
PODCASTTop analyst discusses edge networking trends and environmental and cost of ownership benefits that new Cisco ASR 1000 Series routers deliver to service providers relative to competitive solutions. (10:37)
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