Cisco’s Security Vulnerability Policy provides detailed information about the different ways that customers can receive security vulnerability disclosures from Cisco. These include:
- Cisco’s Website: http://www.cisco.com/security and http://www.cisco.com/go/psirt
- Email: Subscribe to cust-security-announce@cisco.com. To subscribe to this mailing list, send an email message to cust-security-announce-join@cisco.com. You must send messages from the account that will be subscribed to the list. We do not accept subscriptions for one account that are sent from a second account. Emails are only sent for critical and high severity vulnerabilities.
- RSS Feeds: All Cisco security vulnerability information is also available via RSS feeds . These feeds are free and do not require an active Cisco.com registration. For information on how to subscribe to the RSS feeds, visit the Cisco Security RSS Feeds page.
- Cisco Notification Service (CNS): Cisco Notification Service allows users to subscribe and receive important Cisco product and technology information. This service provides an improved unified subscription experience allowing users to choose the timing of notifications, as well as the notification delivery method (email message or RSS feed). Notifications are sent for critical and high severity vulnerabilities only.
- Cisco PSIRT openVuln API: Technical users can take advantage of the Cisco PSIRT openVuln API to obtain vulnerability information and create custom notifications.
RSS Feeds In Detail
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and is a technology to deliver regularly changing web content, for example it allow users to receive timely updates from websites, blogs, news and other content. I would like to provide additional examples on how customers can use open source tools to create notifications and take advantage of Cisco PSIRT RSS feeds.
The simplest way for customers to leverage Cisco RSS feeds on mobile devices is to use the Cisco Technical Support App (http://www.cisco.com/web/about/facts_info/apps/technicalsupport.html). After installing the app, Security Vulnerability Information and other Cisco RSS feeds are available under the Feeds menu off the home page. RSS is a popular format and is likely to be supported by applications you already have on your desktop system or laptop such as Microsoft Outlook. Other free solutions such as feedly provide web based readers that can also be accessed from apps.
Below, I focus on how to configure a popular open source application on Apple MAC OS X called Feeds App. You can download the app via their website or access the source code in GitHub.
The app is pretty simple, it allows you to create desktop notifications when a new item is added to the RSS feed (in this case when a new security advisory is published or updated).
To add the Cisco Security Advisories RSS feed (http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/psirtrss20/CiscoSecurityAdvisory.xml), navigate to Accounts and click on the plus 
sign to add a new RSS feed:
Select RSS/Atom under the Account type pulldown menu and enter the the Cisco Security Advisories RSS feed URL http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/psirtrss20/CiscoSecurityAdvisory.xml
After you add the RSS feed URL the following screen is shown:
You can also customize the interval when the app refresh the feed (queries the RSS feed) under the Options tab.
The following is an example of the Cisco Security Advisory Notifications in the Feeds App. You can hover each advisory to obtain the summary of the vulnerability or click on the item to access the advisory.
The following is an example of the notifications displayed at the moment new advisories are published. In this case, two advisories are displayed. If you click on the notification your default browser will display the advisory from cisco.com.
You can also take advantage of web browser extensions such as RSS-Alert (which is an open source utility that can be obtain from GitHub) or Feeder Chrome Extension.
Cisco Technical Support Mobile App
You can use the Cisco Technical Support mobile app to open and manage your support cases and return materials authorization (RMAs), view your contract information and check product support coverage by serial number, research product information and troubleshoot issues. You can also subscribe to Cisco Security Advisories by leveraging the RSS feed, as demonstrated below.
You can download the Cisco Technical Support mobile app from Apple's App Store, from Google Play, or from Amazon's App Store. Once you install the app, navigate to Feeds, as shown below.
Select Cisco Security Advisories.
The Cisco Security Advisories are displayed and sorted by the last update date.
Click on any of the advisory titles to view the contents of the advisory.
Check out Cisco’s Security Vulnerability Policy for more detailed information about how to receive threat, vulnerability, and mitigation information, and the overall vulnerability management process. Cisco PSIRT will continue to adapt to enable our customers to assess and mitigate any risks in their networks quickly. Our mission is to do the right thing quickly, and to keep our customers protected.
