Re: Vunerabilities are profitable
I think that "can't be patched" is a euphemism for "our code is so rotten and our management and devs are so horrid that we really can't do it."
I worked at a company that produced a network gateway product. The code was written over a ten-year period, and all of the devs were laid off when operations were consolidated and the devs didn't want to relocate. The compiler vendor had gone out of business. Really. And of course the code couldn't be ported to either Borland or Microsoft in a reasonable amount of time, i.e., if you bothered with a port you might as well rewrite all of it. So I fixed bugs in this mess, memory overwrites and bad logic. If I can do it being given a code base in a 20Mb .zip file, the people at Cisco can do it, if they're competent.