Hackers Using 'Shellshock' Bash Vulnerability to Launch Botnet Attacks
Sep 27, 2014
Researchers on Thursday discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the widely used command-line shell GNU Bourne Again Shell ( Bash ), dubbed " Shellshock " which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide, and may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet that is currently trying to infect other servers as well. BOTNET ATTACK IN THE WILD The bot was discovered by the security researcher with the Twitter handle @yinettesys , who reported it on Github and said it appeared to be remotely controlled by miscreants, which indicates that the vulnerability is already being used maliciously by the hackers. The vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) , which came to light on Wednesday, affects versions 1.14 through 4.3 of GNU Bash and could become a dangerous threat to Linux/Unix and Apple users if the patches to BASH are not applied to the operating systems. However, the patches for the vulnerabil...