Technically, this announcement also stops short of saying that any source code was modified.  It just says that they &quot;discovered unauthorized code in ScreenOS that could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen® devices and to decrypt VPN connections&quot;.<p>We all interpret that as a hacker having placed a backdoor there, just as we interpret the Operation Aurora announcement as the Chinese government placing a backdoor in GMail and the NYTimes article as the NSA placing a backdoor in Huawei routers.  We are probably not wrong in this assumption.  But the same CYA deniability is in all three.