My favorite yellow press outlet has decided to propagate hearsay instead of writing “original contributions” (but their mastery of creating sensationalistic titles remains unchallenged). This time, they claim that “New features embedded in Cisco IOS like VoIP and Web services can present an opportunity for hackers”.

The only supporting documentation they provide is a story in SearchSecurity with a sensationalistic title (New Cisco IOS bugs pose tempting targets, says Black Hat researcher) followed by two pages of confusion including gems like “… new deployments of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and VoIP installations may make router exploitation more vulnerable to remote attackers …” supported by “… IPv6 was considered a security threat due to the many net tunnels used to connect to IPv6 …”, which, as anyone who has some basic clue about IPv6 knows, has nothing to do with router vulnerabilities.

Fortunately, Blackhat is a serious undertaking (unlike conferences with grandiose titles like “Cyber Infrastructure Protection”) and provides its presentations online for anyone to see what the presenters were really discussing. I would strongly recommend that you check the excellent “Router Exploitation” presentation by Felix Lindner, which provides a very reasonable analysis of current situation: the routers are exploitable (no surprise there), but it’s very hard to do. Not surprisingly, SNMP is mentioned only once, IPv6 in passing and VoIP only twice (with a good recommendation: don’t run VoIP on your core routers).