Critical router flaw triggers patch from Juniper

A known problem already fixed by Juniper almost a year ago was found to be exploitable, triggering a critical security alert by the company. The recent discovery of the attack vector for the problem saw Juniper alerting its customers directly and a flurry of late night patching by administrators last week. Explaining the situation, security experts noted that it is not unusual for companies to avoid applying "low criticality" patches to core routers.

The uncovered vulnerability affects Juniper's JUNOS version 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 series routers, and results in the router kernel crashing and rebooting upon receiving a network packet with a specifically crafted TCP header.

While no active exploits have been spotted to date, the fact that JUNO's firewall filter is not effective against the vulnerability means that affected routers are effectively wide open to denial of service attacks. This is extremely significant since Juniper's routers represent the second-most-popular routing platform on the Internet. 

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Dark Reading
- check out this article at Network World

Related Articles:
Juniper announces first 100Gbps Ethernet interface card
Google building its own routers?