Cisco Reveals Significant Security Flaw

Just hours after the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity division warned of a potentially serious networking-software flaw, Cisco Systems has followed up with a warning of its own, about a flaw that could place corporate routers and switches at risk of a denial-of-service attack.

According to Cisco's security advisory, the flaw is remotely exploitable and, "successful exploitation of this vulnerability results in a reload of the device. Repeated exploitation could result in a sustained DoS attack."

The Cisco vulnerability is unrelated to the transmission control protocol or border gateway protocol vulnerabilities reported here.

The flaw affects versions 12 through 12.3 of Cisco's Internetwork Operating System. A complete list of affected routers and switches as well as updated remediation information is available here.

The flaw lies in the way Cisco's operating system handles certain simple network management protocol, or SNMP, requests.