North American Network Operators Group
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Re: IOS Rookit: the sky isn't falling (yet)

  • From: Christopher Morrow
  • Date: Tue May 27 11:33:05 2008 
On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Alexander Harrowell
<[email protected]> wrote:
>>An alternative rootkit ? Privilege level 16 used by the Lawful Intercept
>>[12] feature could be abused to do some of this too. Or the other way
>>around: use a "patched" IOS to keep an eye on Law Enforcement's >operations
> on the router as privilege level 15 doesn't allow it and the only
>>alternative is to sniff the traffic export.
>
> The combination of rootkits and specially privileged Lawful Intercept
> functions is a very dangerous one. This was precisely what was exploited in
> the now-legendary and still unsolved Vodafone Greece hack.

to be clear though, the LI functions on cisco are audit-able (assuming
the ios is still cisco not patched/hacked) you just have to snmp-v3 to
audit the activities... which most mediation devices have to do
because the settings don't get committed to config so upon system
reload they have to be re-set to baseline again.

-Chris