Cisco censorship at Black Hat at Daniel Spisak on Technology

As seen at Tom’s Hardware

Yesterday, Michael Lynn, a computer security expert, demonstrated an attack against Cisco routers to a packed audience at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Today we learned that Cisco and Lynn’s former employer, Internet Security Solutions, have responded by filing a restraining order and removing his presentation material from the conference CD.
With the news of the Cisco IOS vulnerability hitting the Internet, attendees at Black Hat were able to pick up a CD with PDFs of all the talks. Cisco employees Mike Caudill and Richard Aceves handed out the CDs. Every presentation was on the disc except for one: Michael Lynn’s.

Attendees immediately saw that these CDs were different from the traditional attendee CDs. In previous years, the CD was colored black and red. In sharp contrast, as you can see from the photo, these CDs look much different and appear to be recently burned.

Looking through the CD, we saw all the updated talks listed in alphabetical order, but Michael Lynn’s talk was missing. According to sources, the original CD with Lynn’s presentation will be published on the Internet.

Rumors continued to spread about an escalating battle bewtween Lynn, ISS and Cisco. However, we were not able to confirm these speculations, which included potential plans of Cisco to file additional legal action hitting Lynn with a copyright violation suit for reverse engineering of the Cisco operating system.

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Dan here…so from what I am hearing from people at DEFCON here today not all the cds with the original presentation and notes were confiscated and some may be showing up in places online shortly. More information as I get it.

About the Author

Daniel Spisak was born from the fiery depths of fusion and now roams the pale blue dot known as Earth. I obtained my bachelors degree in Computer Science from UC Irvine at the end of 2007.

I am also involved in technology & security consulting firms as well as being a freelance technology writer. I also contribute to Jerry Pournelle's website and Chaos Manor Reviews. Additionally I am also a freelance photographer as well and you can find my photos either on my own personal gallery or up at my Flickr account or on Zivity.

This blog is one of the main locations where I do my writing, which is then automatically sent to my LiveJournal, VOX, and MySpace accounts. I can also be found on a variety of social networking and microblogging sites like Pownce, Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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