Stories by: Linda Leung

Cisco Wednesday released its first new security alert of the year: a warning that its Cisco Unified Communications Manager - formerly CallManager - contains a heap overflow vulnerability in the Certificate Trust List that could allow a hacker to cause a denial-of-service attack or execute arbitrary code.

Even the best of us has bad days, but when Cisco has them for whatever reason, they get reported widely. Here are our picks of the top-7 bad luck happenings in Ciscoland in the past year, ranging from the departure from Cisco of a high-flying exec to a wireless LAN data flooding to some major problems with Cisco VoIP equipment.

Cisco made 11 acquisitions this year culminating in 126 purchases since Cisco's birth. It made three more acquisitions than it did last year, when it spent a measly US$256 million buying ho-hum technologies. This year was different, not only in the sheer dollar size of some acquisitions, but also because of the breadth of technologies it acquired. From social networks to broadband wireless, we take a look at what Cisco Subnet has named Cisco's top-six acquisitions of 2007. We also look at what Cisco should have bought and what Cisco may be looking to buy in 2008.

Cisco is warning that a flaw in its Firewall Services Module could result in a reload of the module, or if exploited repeatedly, could result in a sustained denial-of-service attack.

Cisco confirmed it is possible to eavesdrop on remote conversations using Cisco VoIP phones. In its security response, Cisco says: "an attacker with valid Extension Mobility authentication credentials could cause a Cisco Unified IP Phone configured to use the Extension Mobility feature to transmit or receive a Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) audio stream."

Cisco late Monday confirmed that it is still experiencing problems with its Cisco.com Web site, portions of which have been inaccessible to customers and visitors for most of the day.

IPv6 is not a "maybe" that could be 10 or 20 years out in the future; it is a hard reality you are going to encounter, possibly before the end of this decade, IP routing expert and author of Routing IP published by Cisco Press, Jeff Doyle, claims. He has detailed his top seven considerations for rolling out IPv6.

IBM opened the doors to its R&D lab in Silicon Valley last week to show off some of the research that is happening around its research facilities in the United States. These include 'IBM's Next Five in Five,' a list of innovations that Big Blue believes could affect the way people work, live and play over the next five years.

If you were thinking of extending your vendor certifications to include Nortel and you're already a Cisco Certified Voice Professional, then you are halfway toward achieving Nortel's VoIP product certification designations.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a certification program for "elite" IT architects. The program, which is currently in beta, will produce Microsoft Certified Architects, who are project leaders with broad and deep understanding of technologies and enterprise architectural frameworks. The software giant says it expects the program to be in full swing in the first half of 2006.

Cisco Systems, which had been one of the most acquisitive vendors in the IT industry, now says it plans to scale back and be more discriminatory when purchasing other networking companies due to the depressed economy.