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Security IT

Cisco Hit By an Internal Network Outage (techcrunch.com) 33

Posted by msmash from the outage-report dept.
Not a great start to the day for Cisco employees, many of which are struggling in the face of an internal IT outage. From a report: The technology and networking giant confirmed in a tweet it was "aware of some disruption" to its IT systems and is "working" on restoring the network. Worse, the company's corporate blog also went kaput. For a period, Cisco's blog was displaying the default WordPress install page. But at the time of publication, the blog had been restored. Some customers were unable to login through Cisco's single sign-on.
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Cisco Hit By an Internal Network Outage More

Cisco Hit By an Internal Network Outage

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  • Can't wait for today's meeting with the Cisco Rep (Score:5, Funny)

    by bluelip ( 123578 ) on Thursday October 10, 2019 @11:27AM (#59292444) Homepage Journal

    Cisco has been pushing their new subscriptions for everything. Their software has always sucked.

    A nice jab to the sales rep today will relieve some stress.

  • Heh. (Score:2)

    by Miser ( 36591 )

    Someone didn't renew their smartnet? /ducks

    -Miser

  • Well this is embarrassing. (Score:4, Funny)

    by skids ( 119237 ) on Thursday October 10, 2019 @11:40AM (#59292514) Homepage

    Networking is their thing. This is sort of like a barber showing up at his shop with an albert einstein/bernie sanders hairdew.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geek ( 5680 )

      Might not be the network though. If they are using SSO then it could their triple A servers having issues or any number of other things. Doesn't take much to lock out an enterprise of any size with a bad config change.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ffejie ( 779512 )
      Reminds me of the old joke:

      Two barbers in town, one's shop is meticulously kept, totally clean, and his hair is perfect. The second's shop is a total mess, things are breaking, and his hair is a "Albert Einstein." Which do you go to?

      Go to the second's shop. The second barber is so busy with business, she doesn't have time to clean - she's too busy with her customers. Her hair is a mess because the first barber cuts it. The first barber has nothing to do but clean, and gets the second to cut his perfect h

    • Or like your cancer treatment doctor dying of cancer.

  • Ransomware? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday October 10, 2019 @11:49AM (#59292556)

    Usually when you read about full network outages, the thing that comes to mind is ransomware. Even with all the news and warnings, it's not easy for large companies to restructure their networks in a zero-trust fashion. Almost everywhere, once you're on an internal LAN you can basically go anywhere. Even if you have client side firewalls, you're bound to hit someone with a misconfiguration or missed patch.

    Another factor not helping is that I'm sure Cisco has given all their internal IT over to one of the big offshore outsourcers. Software companies are famous for this, which is kind of ironic considering that they're technology companies. Once a company does this, there's another wall to jump over to get anyone to do anything. It's too bad...maybe they'll learn a lesson and trigger the "send-it-back-in-house" phase of the outsource/insource cycle early.

    • Another factor not helping is that I'm sure Cisco has given all their internal IT over to one of the big offshore outsourcers. Software companies are famous for this, which is kind of ironic considering that they're technology companies.

      I haven't worked for Cisco in 20 years so I don't know jack about what they're doing now, but back then they did literally all their own IT. And they're not just software companies, Cisco designs hardware too. I used to admin a cable modem dev/QA lab in Santa Cruz, in a facility formerly leased by TGV which Cisco bought. At the time TGV was working on a fast TCP stack for Windows 95, which Cisco canned. My housemate at the time was the IT manager for that site.

      It's pretty sad when the company that invented

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dougmc ( 70836 )

        It's pretty sad when the company that invented the router can't keep its network up.

        And this bit of irony is probably exactly why this made it on /. .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      Well I haven't worked there in about 13 years, but I remember one incident where a worm got into a security camera LAN where stuff was running under everyone's favorite operating system from Bellevue, and it was a gigabit LAN. Enough junk got out (a sort of digital Hawking radiation) that it basically DDOSed their core network. That was also one of the few times I got to see how badly TCP/IP performs with as little as 25% packet loss. (The other time was DSL over a dying copper line, but the analog voice se

  • It's not an IT problem... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    #PGEshutdown

  • SSO works for me. Maybe they actually test their backups. Shocking I know.

  • might as well just pack up and go to lunch, Starbucks or home

    • You know... I had one like that in the early days of switching. Shortly after Grand Junction Networks was bought out.

  • Smartnet (Score:3)

    by Salo2112 ( 628590 ) on Thursday October 10, 2019 @12:19PM (#59292720)
    I hope their smartnet contracts are up to date and that they get someone on the phone they can understand.

  • they're asking for an ass-raping

    what garbage, the bane of security everywhere

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Most corporate web sites seem to use it, though, mostly because it makes it a lot easier for the Marketing folks (who struggle to understand even the most basic HTML formatting commands) to update the content on the web site themselves.

      But, yeah, if you're not patching it frequently, you're gonna get screwed.

      • Most corporate web sites seem to use it, though, mostly because it makes it a lot easier for the Marketing folks (who struggle to understand even the most basic HTML formatting commands) to update the content on the web site themselves.

        Sure, but there are alternatives. For all its faults, even Drupal is more secure than WordPress. And it can do all the same crap.

        I'm looking for a third alternative now, though. I hate the idea of using a fork of Drupal (Backdrop), but my site won't migrate cleanly from D7 to D8. The body copy doesn't show up in the imported site. Srsly. So if I don't find some other alternative to which it's reasonably simple to migrate my Drupal content, Backdrop it is. I have until Nov. '21 to figure it out though, so I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geek ( 5680 )

      Not really. Wordpress as a core is fine, its the plugins that have repeatedly had issues. From a security perspective it's better to use a widely used suite like this with fast turn around times in security patches and many eyes on it than to roll your own and pray.

      Think of it like encryption. Is it better to use AES 256 or to roll your own?

      • With WordPress, it may be more like "is it better to use ROT13 or roll your own?" Of course the answer is "neither, use something good".

        WordPress may have improved somewhat. Several years ago, they absolutely did not care one bit about security. I pointed out flaws and they were ignored. I *think* it's improved somewhat, but there are still new vulnerabilities found in WordPress regularly.

        It also still more or less requires suexec, which is a really, really bad idea unless you're sharing a server with t

  • And they still have network issues.

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