Most of the security problems that get big press notice effect desktop computers or enterprise servers. While these issues can be serious (especially if they lead to consumer’s private information being released), they pale in possible impact to the havoc that can be wrought by exploits of network infrastructure hardware. News.com has reported on Cisco’s release of information on two vulnerabilities in the gateway hardware that enables Network Access Control (NAC). The good news is that there haven’t been any expoits reported that take advantage of the vulnerabilities. The bad news is that known vulnerabilities go unexploited for only so long, and there are hundreds of organizations that patch their infrastructure code on a long-duration cycle.

The takeaway here is to make sure your infrastructure hardware is updated with the same sort of urgency most of us save for our laptops and servers. If you have Cisco gear and want to check out the original notice, you can find it here.

Categories: Security, Networking