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Comment by derpherpsson | Hacker News Reader

Cisco is crumbling under its own weight.

This is a symptom of the rot in their management, and probably also a sign that they have hired too many incompetents.

It probably also is a sign of the current age. After the recovery from the IT-bubble programming got really hot. Thus: Too many of the new programmers wants to be programmers because it pays well - not because they love their craft. So therefore we have a bunch of well-paid but uninterested people seeking jobs at prestigious companies.

Culture matters. I want my socially maladapt terminal junkies back plz.

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> I want my socially maladept neckbeards and terminal junkies back plz.

the MBA types don't like these hacker types - personality clash and whatnots.

But the MBA types control the company from above, and the hacker types don't like to do management work. The result is obvious.

Some time ago I went through the list of all the major router manufacturers and rated them on 1) security, and 2) long term usability, and 3) culture.

My conclusion was that I would buy my infrastructure from Allied Telesis. It's pretty much a Japanese version of Cisco, but it's still healthy.

Ubiquity was number 2. I refrain from buying from them only because of their glossy UI.

Mikrotik was on that list. Until I saw how horrible their winbox protocol was. And their implementation of SMB.. I must assume there are still plenty of unknown RCEs there.

https://threatpost.com/hardware-vendor-offers-backdoor-every...

At least Allied Telesis documents their backdoors :)

LOL

I guess there is nothing good.. what is wrong with people :(

Oh god...

disable winbox and use their webui?

also, while not perfect, what is so horrible about their winbox protocol?

Can you elaborate on Mikrotik? I've only heard good things about them and am very satisfied with the one hAP I bought from them.

They have had several remote code execution vulnerabilities lately (summer 2018). While they were very quick to patch them they did not notify their customers in any way. There was nothing on their website that said anything about the urgency.

Instead of reusing functionality that exists in the router already (ssh?), the authentication for winbox is something they built themselves. It was in the winbox auth that the main security flaw was. It just looked really bad to me.

The winbox client also downloads and runs any DLL that is sent by the winbox server. The winbox client has a windows certificate so all it's code is trusted. So own the router and you get the admins workstation too.

It just feels like maybe they hired some random guy without much appreciation for security for doing winbox.

The SMB server also had a rce a while ago.

That said, I guess that if you disable winbox and stuff that should not face the internet, you are probably safe?

Too much for me though. I would not feel safe.

WinBox is not that simple and cannot be replaced with SSH. WinBox works on Ethernet level, so one can connect to router by MAC address and recover when IP level configuration is invalid.

I had several Allied Telesis switches at a previous job. The hardware was fine but resetting the configuration password was a remarkably painful process.

Culture matters. I want my socially maladapt terminal junkies back plz.

I know some fastidiously groomed VSCode front-end hipsters whose entire bodies involuntarily tense up if you suggest a lazy technical workaround to them. It's funny and makes me feel good about the future.

But I get you; I agree completely. You do need people who really care. They're just not as easy to stereotype any more (if they ever were.)

Your first point is just blabber. Cisco is a large company and this is a $100 product that they don't really care much about. It's the type of product that is produced at the cheapest possible cost, by interns. The way this product has been developed and managed is completely intentional and not a sign of mismanagement. Come back in 3 and then 6 months and let's see what effect this has had on their revenue and market cap, and then you can start talking about mismanagement.

As a sign of the quality of the current median developer, I think you are spot on. But I don't know that it's worth griping about. That is the world in which we live ... so live in it. In fact, all the better for those of us (if I may dare to put myself in a more elite group) that are highly skilled ... we don't have to work on some me-too unimportant SOHO router, at correspondingly low me-too unimportant wages.

Bwahaha, hired too many incompetents?

They have outsourced the fuck out of their projects to uh, questionable means.

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