Bill "Ches" Cheswick, Chief Scientist of Lumeta and Internationally Renowned Security Expert Comments on CERT SNMP Vulnerability Alert.

Business Editors/High-Tech Editors

SOMERSET, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 2002

"I have never seen a vulnerability of this magnitude

to the Internet itself"

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT (r)), the research organization at Carnegie Mellon University) and the Oulu University Secure Programming Group announced a series of very serious vulnerabilities in equipment that responds to the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

If exploited, it is possible that routers across the global Internet could be crashed, suffer serious performance degradation, or be commandeered.

Bill Cheswick, Chief Scientist of Lumeta Corporation and internationally renowned security expert, described the vulnerability, "It involves very complicated software. They probably haven't found all the problems with it, and I suspect we'll be hearing more about this in the future."

"I have never seen a vulnerability of this magnitude to the Internet itself," continued Cheswick. "It is conceivable that this could make large parts of the Internet quite unreliable for quite a while. The vendors and ISPs are scrambling to deal with this."

Cheswick, who co-wrote the book "Firewalls and Internet Security: Beware the Wily Hacker," stated, "As a first step, companies should to turn off SNMP on any equipment that doesn't absolutely need it."

Cheswick continued, "To help protect the equipment that must be managed via SNMP, companies should configure their firewalls to block SNMP traffic that comes from outside their network. It isn't sufficient to change the SNMP community strings."

"Although it doesn't entirely mitigate the risks identified in the advisory released yesterday, companies should also identify those devices that respond to 'public' or other common default community strings," said Cheswick. "I think they will be shocked at how open they are. As part of Lumeta's Network Discovery analysis, we look for routers that are open. Even though many companies have a stated policy that their equipment should not respond to public community strings, we typically find that between 10 and 30 percent of the SNMP-managed devices do respond. This shows the difficulties of knowing the configuration of every SNMP device in a large network, and it foreshadows the challenges companies will face rolling out the fixes uniformly once the vendors issue patches that address these vulnerabilities."

About Lumeta Corporation

Lumeta Corporation takes a revolutionary approach to network management and security. Originating from Bell Labs Research, Lumeta's breakthrough services provide a comprehensive, foundational knowledge of an enterprise network for risk, change and asset management. Its management team includes CEO Tom B. Dent and security expert Bill "Ches" Cheswick. Lumeta is the source of network knowledge for the network administrators, CIOs and CFOs, who are accountable for their corporate network activity and security.

Headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey, Lumeta serves many of the leading Fortune 500 companies. Investors include: Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and meVC Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund I. For more information, visit the Lumeta website at www.lumeta.com.