There are many ways to respond to injustice, both large and small, but each response is important. While we acknowledge it is a small change, Cisco Talos is moving to replace our use of the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist" with "block list" and "allow list.” Even though these terms are commonly in use in the security industry, we will not go along with casually assigning positive connotations to "white" while assigning negative connotations to "black.”

We stand by Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins’ statement that we will do everything in our power to fight racism and inequality everywhere, including in the cyber security field. Robbins recently announced that Cisco is donating $5 million to various organizations dedicated to eradicating racial inequality and injustice, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Equal Justice Initiative and Color of Change. We echo the words that have spread across the world: Black Lives Matter.

You will start to see our change over to block list and allow list over the next few weeks. When these changes impact our users, we’ll post the appropriate announcements here on our blog and on our social media accounts. As you can imagine, there are many downstream dependencies to this and making this change may take some time.