While the company was investigating whether a breach had lead to the leak, a representative could not confirm whether that network intruders had made off with the software equivalent of the crown jewels: some 800 megabytes of the networking giant's source code.

"Cisco is aware that a potential compromise of its proprietary information occurred and was reported on a public Web site just prior to the weekend," said Jim Brady, spokesman for the company. "The Cisco information security team is looking into this matter and investigating what happened."

By Robert Lemos at ZDNet.

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