The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation is working with Cisco Systems to investigate the theft of computer source code from the networking company, says Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman. Confirmation of the theft from law enforcement comes amid scant information on the fate of Cisco"s code, days after two sample source code files from the company"s Internetwork Operating System were posted on a Russian Web site, a small piece of what was said to be more than 800 megabytes of IOS code.
Details Sketchy
The FBI would not provide further details, beyond confirming that it was working with Cisco. According to a posting on www.securitylab.ru, malicious hackers made off with code for versions 12.3 of IOS after "breaking the Cisco corporate network." IOS is a proprietary operating system that runs on much of the networking hardware that Cisco makes. Cisco acknowledged the theft on Monday but provided few details about how it was obtained. "Cisco is aware that a potential compromise of its proprietary information occurred and was reported on a public Web site just prior to the weekend. Cisco is fully investigating what happened," the company said in a statement.