Shellshock security vulnerability might affect millions of computers

Shellshock is a serious vulnerability that might affect millions of computers throughout the world. It has been found out that this problem might be relevant for MAC, Linux, and Windows users. Unfortunately, Shellshock affects not only computers. The recent study has shown that this security vulnerability might have an impact on countless websites and various home routers as well. Shellshock is not a simple bug; if it is not fixed very quickly, there is a huge possibility that cyber criminals and various hackers will use it to take over the control of computers in order to do various suspicious activities without the permission of computer users.

How does Shellshock act?

This security vulnerability is mainly associated with Bash (stands for Bourne-Again Shell) which can be described as a command-line shell. It can be found on many Unix computers. As it has been found out, Bash is typically used by programmers and it allows users issue commands in order to launch different programs and features within software. Some experts claim that Shellshock bug is more serious than Heartbleed bug, which was discovered in April. It is because Heartbleed is associated with spying, whereas Shellshock might be responsible for giving the direct access to the system. On top of that, only 500,000 machines had Heartbleed vulnerability while Shellshock could hit at least 500 million machines. As it can be seen, Shellshock is definitely a more serious vulnerability.

The security experts have rated this Bash bug as 10 out of 10 for severity. The bug received such an evaluation because it has been revealed that hackers might use Shellshock and take over the operating system, access, record, and steal your confidential information as well as make various changes without user’s consent. On top of that, the vulnerability might be used to infect web servers with malware. Therefore, all the major companies are developing the updates that would help to fix this bug. Unfortunately, there are no available updates at the time of writing.

How to get rid of Shellshock?

You might ask what you should do in order not to allow hackers to use this security vulnerability. Actually, the only thing that computer users can do is to keep their OS and software up-to-date. Those who can afford it should look to their monitoring and web application firewalls to notice the attacks. As patches that can fix security vulnerabilities and other bugs are not created yet, we can just hope that hackers are not as smart as defenders.

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