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Cisco's a Slow Learner

Posted by Jordan Wiens on March 15, 2007

The recent flap over the default password for Cisco's Unified IP Phone isn't the first time Cisco has had password problems. You'd think a company that has spent so much on security branding would be careful about getting the basics right.

We're long past struggling with basic authentication security and default passwords that persist long after they should. Microsoft learned its lesson with the Slammer worm back in 2003. Microsoft SQL now forces you to change the SA password and refuses a blank one. Cisco's phones shouldn't have hard-coded passwords. That would have saved users the trouble of upgrades or ACLs to mitigate the problem. --Jordan Wiens, jwiens@nwc.com