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A comment on Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?) [video]. Parent comment

Re:Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?)... by noncoml on Sunday April 28, 2024 @05:41AM (#40187303)
I’ve worked for Cisco for 11 years (both TAC and R&D) and this anecdote is ridiculous.

There is no such special back door for TAC. It would be stupidly incompetent if NSA would allow Cisco to use their back door for their own convenience.

Also there is no back door visible in the source code. Again it would be stupid if there was since there are tens of thousands of engineers looking at the code that could decide to take advantage of it for their own benefit.

If there is an NSA back door only very few select people in Cisco know about it.

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Re:Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?)... by jijijijij on Sunday April 28, 2024 @07:07AM (#40187671)
IIRC the documented incidents from the Snowden files were about hardware backdoors/additions added in transit. But they required CISCO to turn a blind eye, at the very least, I think.
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Re:Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?)... by oyashirochama on Sunday April 28, 2024 @05:59AM (#40187381)
If there's an NSA backdoor, the NSA wouldn't let a corporation even know about it.
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Re:Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?)... by jiggawatts on Sunday April 28, 2024 @07:38AM (#40187837)
Juniper included the back-doored EC-DRBG algorithm into their VPN products on the orders of the NSA, so this kind of behaviour is not without precedent.

Unless you're a very senior staff member, at the director level, you would not be privy to these kinds of orders. It would implemented without the knowledge of the vast majority of the staff.

Your ignorance of a backdoor is not evidence of its absence.

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Re:Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?)... by sekh60 on Sunday April 28, 2024 @07:48AM (#40187896)
That was kinda their point. They weren't denying that one exists, just pointing out that the Cisco response that it was for support use was laughable.
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Re:Nation state backdoor found in Cisco firewalls (again..?)... by jiggawatts on Sunday April 28, 2024 @08:51AM (#40188236)
Cisco never claimed it was for support use. It was more than some support techs knew about the back door, and were using it unofficially for their own convenience.

The official statement, if I remember correctly, was brief, vaguely worded, and amount to: "We can't say anything, every US vendor is in the same boat as us, stop asking".

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