Cisco to Black Hat: "If I give you some money, will you still love me?"

Earlier this week, I was reading an article at Infoworld titled After lawsuit, Cisco embraces Black Hat. If you'll remember back to last year, Cisco sued both everybody and their brother to stop the release of information regarding an IOS security vulnerability. Security researcher Michael Lynn was confronted with a restraining order stopping him from talking about the issue and Cisco sent a bunch of folks over to Black Hat to cut/tear the pages of Lynn's presentation from the conference proceedings (juicy video).

This year, Cisco is a platinum sponsor of the event. In an understatement of the year, the Infoworld article quotes Cesar Cerrudo, chief executive officer of security research firm Argeniss as saying, "I think they realized that public relations is more efficient than legal battles." Yup.

Not to belabor the point, but we'd be more than happy for the broad security community to help us find potential exploits in the Vyatta code base. You can grab the complete source online, right now. All we ask is for a little notification as a courtesy before any publishing. Other than that, have at it. We're very interested in security issues and we'll work with you rather than bringing legal action against you.