Cisco's TCP stack is vulnerable to attack
CISCO SYSTEMS has announced that several of its products have vulnerabilities that could be exploited with denial of service attacks.
Today the company said that the flaws could be used to manipulate TCP connections, forcing them into an indefinitely long-lived state. In order to take advantage of the vulnerabilities a hacker need only complete a three-way TCP handshake with a vulnerable system, Cisco said.
Some Cisco hardware apparently is more vulnerable to the problems than others. For example, Nexus 5000 devices harbour a TCP denial of service vulnerability that could lead to system crashes.