A post by CiscoSubnet has pointed me to the official IntelliShield alert describing the AS-path incident. While the alert is very well written (I wouldn’t expect less) and the associated Protecting Border Gateway Protocol for the Enterprise is excellent, I was highly amused by the following text:

Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has identified a method through which administrators can modify device configurations to mitigate the effects of the AS path processing issue. Administrators can limit the amount of AS path segments that are associated with any route by using the bgp maxas-limit feature …

The bgp maxas-limit command was suggested by some members of the NANOG mailing list as early as few hours after the incident (which happened on February 16th; the IntelliShield alert has been released on February 20th) and I’ve released a detailed article on February 17th. I know Cisco’s engineers did a great job in this particular case; why did someone have to run their results through the /usr/local/marketese | /usr/bin/bowdlerize?