Everything you need to know about the Shellshock Bash bug
Published on by Eric L. Barnes
In all likelihood, we haven’t even begun the fathom the breadth of this vulnerability. Of course there are a lot of comparisons being made to Heartbleed and there are a number of things we learned from that exercise. One is that it took a bit of time to sink in as we realised the extent to which we were dependent on OpenSSL. The other is that it had a very long tail – months after it hit there were still hundreds of thousands of known hosts left vulnerable.
But in one way, the Heartbleed comparison isn’t fair – this is potentially far worse. Heartbleed allowed remote access to small amount of data in the memory of affected machines. Shellshock is enabling remote code injection of arbitrary commands pre-auth which is potentially far more dire.
It’s been a crazy few years for security.
Eric is the creator of Laravel News and has been covering Laravel since 2012.