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Juniper, Cisco Hardware Vulnerable To DoS Attacks

Products from switch and router makers Juniper and Cisco have fatal flaws that could let hackers craft denial-of-service attacks which could disrupt enterprise networks, government and private security organizations said this week.

Customers should take the vulnerabilities seriously, wrote Amrit Williams, a Gartner analyst, in an online briefing posted Wednesday.

"A denial of service attack against a networking device has a much greater potential to affect productivity and networkwide functions than an attack against a workstation," he said.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) on Wednesday warned that all Juniper Network routers which run JUNOS software created prior to Jan. 7 of this year are susceptible to remotely-triggered DoS attacks.

"A remote, unauthenticated attacker may cause severe operational disruption to affected Juniper routers," the advisory stated. "Affected routers will suffer an effective denial of routing service when this vulnerability is exploited."

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