Cisco Denies Router Vulnerability Claims

Cisco Systems is downplaying a news story that suggests new security flaws may have been discovered in some of its routers.

First reported on a Washington Post weblog, the story says that officials removed approximately 30 pages from the 1,000-plus-page collection of presentation materials for this week's Black Hat 2005 conference in Las Vegas. The conference is an annual event for security professionals, sponsored by the Black Hat think tank, offering lectures, seminars and training sessions on the latest developments in network security.

On Wednesday, researcher Michael Lynn of Internet Security Systems (ISS) was scheduled to deliver a presentation on Cisco router vulnerabilities, but dropped out before his scheduled time. The pages taken from the conference guide were from Lynn's presentation, and his presentation was not rescheduled. Lynn did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment on this story.

A Cisco spokesman says the presentation was to be about how to deal with existing security flaws in Cisco routers, but that Lynn and Cisco officials simply decided more research was needed before they could present their findings.

"There are no new security flaws," the spokesman says. "The presentation was meant to discuss how hackers can exploit known vulnerabilities further, and how to combat that. We mutually decided with ISS that further research was needed, so we postponed the presentation to a later date."

No subsequent date has been set.