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The NSA used to intercept Cisco routers in-transit to swap them out for back-doored ones.

I'm sure they knew about these, that's the problem, the NSA "hoards" zero-days instead of alerting the manufacturers.

And then we end up with nonsense like this, and you know half of these won't be patched for years, if ever.

Tens of millions of Cisco devices.

If they have a known exploit in the normal firmware, why bother MITMing hardware in order to backdoor it?

Flytraps! Probably easier than finding rces

They may not have known about these protocol flaws at the time they were intercepting the physical devices.

Either that, or they were not vulnerable to these exploits at the time.