I see from my newspaper this morning that somebody has stolen the codes that control the internet. Oo-er!
In fact this seems closer to the truth than you might imagine from the spy thriller language. Owning 800MB of source code for Cisco routers makes it conceivable that hackers could find exploits that would allow them to capture and decrypt traffic that would give them access to supposedly secure computer systems.
Bruce Schneier hasn’t posted on this yet, but I’m sure he will. He will say that the source code should have been in the public domain all along, as he has said before about code for voting machines. If the code is written properly it shouldn’t be possible to hack the traffic whether you know how it’s being handled or not. If the source code was public then the vulnerabilities would have been spotted long ago. On this I agree with him.