Cisco Systems has confirmed published reports that a researcher at this week's BlackHat conference demonstrated a vulnerability affecting the company's PIX firewall security appliances.

"We confirm that we are aware of this information, but we can't confirm the validity of the claims," says Cisco spokesman John Noh. "Here's what we know: This information resulted from a brief mention of it from a researcher at the BlackHat conference who had presented about something else, and he threw up a slide at the end of the presentation about a possible vulnerability affecting the PIX firewall."

Cisco's Product Security Incident Response team is currently investigating the issue. While it plans to issue a formal response, Cisco provided no details on when it would do so.

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