Hackers

Update on this story. Poor Mike Lynn is not only out of a job but now the FBI is investigating him for having revealed a fatal flaw in the Cisco routers.

The news of the criminal investigation came just hours after Lynn signed a settlement with Cisco and ISS releasing him from civil liability in exchange for meeting several conditions. Lynn was to provide a mirror image of all computer data he has and give it to a third party for forensic analysis. This was likely to determine if he had stolen proprietary information from ISS or Cisco or broken any other laws. His research material on the vulnerability would then have to be erased. Lynn also was prohibited from discussing the bug in the future.

Fortunately his lawyer believes the investigation will not result in an arrest and is merely a routine result of the civil suit. One hopes she is right. The poor guy has been through enough already.

Meanwhile in a related development, angry hackers at the Defcon computer-security conference worked feverishly to exploit the flaw in order to debunk the company's claim that it was not serious. Lynn had demonstrated the flaw at another conference but had not divulged the source code necessary to replicate his hack.