Unauthorized code in Juniper ScreenOS allows for administrative access
Hoo boy, most of these things don't worry me, but this one does.I'm semi-responsible for some Juniper gear, thankfully all Junos (BSD) based, but I no longer trust any of it if this is malicious injection vs. a bad review. However, what the hell can I do? I can't audit the code. I trusted Juniper, and now I'm stuck with that trust being burned. Running to any other proprietary network vendor is just as uncertain.If Junos gets a bulletin, I have a lot of work on my hands very soon, as do a good chunk of service providers. I remember there being rumors of a certain three-letter agency saying they had some type of exploit for the Cisco ASA as well; I wonder if it was something this deep, vs. just a run of the mill RCE vuln.This is one more reason to use open-source products for actually security-sensitive systems, maintain a good amount of defense in depth, and do a little bit of auditing of the code you're using yourself. More often than not these days, it sure pays to be paranoid.EDIT: At the same time, this also really makes me respect Juniper more than I have previously. A company that finds this internally, on their own audit, could have patched it silently and said nothing about it to anybody. It probably would have been better for them PR-wise. The honesty is worth me not jumping ship to another (probably compromised) proprietary vendor, but you betcha if I can get away with it, I'll run something open-source and community audited when I can.