Network Outage Tonight

[Jerry]

In case you haven't heard, this was sent out by OIT.


All:

I have just received word from the Illinois Century Network, who is our Internet Service Provider, they have detected that a:

 "vulnerability exists with the operating system that is used on the majority of the Cisco routers on the ICN backbone network.  Although no incidents or problems have yet been reported, the vulnerability has the potential to cause major disruptions in service.

Because of the extreme urgency of the situation, it has been determined that all impacted ICN backbone equipment must be upgraded without delay.

Beginning at 9:00 p.m. this evening, ICN staff will be taking backbone routers off line for brief periods to perform the upgrades necessary to ensure that these essential network components are not vulnerable to malicious attack.  During this time, constituents may experience brief disruptions in service.  It is expected that upgrades will be complete by 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning if all goes as planned."

Thank you for your patience.

[Chris Swingler]

So what's the explination for all the _unannounced_ network outages we had in the last two semesters?

--Beanie

[Michael Kennedy]

I've already encountered this quite a while ago and actually had some routers get hit with this long before the actual advisory was announced.  I can show the log activity pretty soon if anyone is interested in seeing it.  

Here's the CERT advisory for all of those who are interested: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-15.html

[Michael Kennedy]

Oh, and here's the Slashdot link to the actual exploit.  This didn't take very long to surface...

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/18/1641253