On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 4:13 AM, TS Lura <tsl...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dear OpenBSD community, > > I'm doing a small research paper on Cisco and try to find out if they are > "evil" or not in relative to open/free source/standards, and business > practice. Eg. locking people to their product line aka the MS way. > > My experience has nothing to do with the sales/support side of Cisco, but I'm going to reply anyway!
As a sys admin with servers located at the old Mae West building (San Jose, Market and Post), I had a password dictionary attack launched against my mail server from a compromised machine inside of Cisco's test labs. I was able to verify through unrelated networks and DNS servers that the compromised machine was located in their test labs in San Jose. Most of you with this experience will agree that an attack from within the same city as your server, let alone the same country, is quite rare. Despite my emailing all associated admin addresses I could find with Cisco, and even getting one reply back from a sysadmin of theirs, the machine remained corrupted and spewing out dictionary attacks for quite some time. Of course, I was blocking it both at the application and firewall. After a couple of weeks I gave up checking to see if the machine had even been shutdown. As a person who Cisco had no monetary interest in, but was directly affecting through their own negligence, I received as much care as Ben Stein might expect from a 1935 German Healthcare Plan.
