What is "yersinia"

n. A Gram-negative bacterium, of the genus ''Yersinia'', that is an etiological agent of several diseases in animals and humans, notably ''Yersinia pestis'', which causes bubonic plague.

Yersinia is a genus of bacteria in the family Enterobacteriaceae. Yersinia species are Gram-negative, rod-shaped bacteria, a few micrometers long and fractions of a micrometer in diameter, and are facultative anaerobes. Some members of Yersinia are pathogenic in humans; in particular, Y. pestis is the causative agent of the plague. Rodents are the natural reservoirs of Yersinia; less frequently, other mammals serve as the host. Infection may occur either through blood (in the case of Y. pestis) or in an alimentary fashion, occasionally via consumption of food products (especially vegetables, milk-derived products, and meat) contaminated with infected urine or feces.

Speculations exist as to whether or not certain Yersinia can also be spread by protozoonotic mechanisms, since Yersinia species are known to be facultative intracellular parasites; studies and discussions of the possibility of amoeba-vectored (through the cyst form of the protozoan) Yersinia propagation and proliferation are now in progress.

Yersinia - is a network security/ hacking tool for Unix-like operating systems, designed to take advantage of some weakness in different network protocols. Yersinia is considered a valuable and widely used security tool. As of 2013 Yersinia is still under development with a latest stable version number 0.7.3 available only at GitHub source code repository.

Attacks for the following network protocols are implemented:

• Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)
• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
• Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
• Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP)
• IEEE 802.1Q
• IEEE 802.1X
• Cisco Inter-Switch Link (ISL)
• VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP)

Yersinia was rated #59 at SecTools.Org: Top 125 Network Security Tools