full-disclosure - IDS (ISS) and reverse engineering

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Message-ID: <005801c3b3fd$df59d4d0$6400a8c0@WITT>
From: vosipov at tpg.com.au (V.O.)
Subject: IDS (ISS) and reverse engineering

Recently I've got to listen to a marketing pitch by an ISS guy. He was going
along the lines of "our X-force reverse-engineered Microsoft RPC libraries
and created signatures..." and "we use protocol decoding, so we
reverse-engineered various closed-source protocols in order to create out
decoders".

What struck me - isn't this kind of activity actually illegal in the US? To
which extent it is possible to disassemble Windows code? And if it is
illegal, then aren't their customers (plus many other IDSes, with the
exclusion of Snort, probably) in danger - what if Microsoft or whoever else
sues ISS for doing this? :)

I'm puzzled.