Management shakeup underway at Nortel

Two weeks after Mike Zafirovski took over as Nortel CEO, a management shakeup is underway. Longtime executives Brian McFadden and Sue Spradley have been shown the door, and analysts believe more heads will roll as Mike Z. fields his own executive management team. McFadden was chief research officer and Spradley was president of global services and operations. Both had to return bonuses received during Nortel’s accounting fraud scandal, and both had been shifted around the upper management ranks for the past two years as Nortel reorganized a couple of times to streamline its operations as it restated financial results.

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Security researchers this week said they discovered a hole in the Web server code in Cisco’s IOS software. The flaw could allow attackers – armed only with knowledge of the Cisco device’s IP address – to gain administrative control of a Cisco device or run arbitrary code on the machine, according to claims. The vulnerability – as reported by the security organizations Secunia and SecurityFocus – could allow a potential attacker to view a memory dump (a record of the data in a router’s memory) of an IOS router via the HTTP server and inject script code into the router through the HTTP server. Attackers could use this method to get administrator-level access to a Cisco router or switch or run code on the device.

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The cyber attacks of recent years have been relatively unsophisticated and inexpensive compared to the potential of organized attacks. Organized attacks by teams of hackers that have members with expertise in business functions and processes – as well the rudimentary access and coding expertise that many current attackers have – could have a huge impact on a nation’s economy, said Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an agency supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.