Shellshock: What You Need to Know

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new bug crawling the web space recently that can potentially affect a lot of people especially those using devices running on the Unix operating system along with its variants including Apple’s OS X.
But before you go into a state of panic, try to read the rest of this article so that you know what exactly is this bug and if know if your devices are vulnerable to any attack.

The first thing you need to know is that the Shellshock bug affects devices running Unix based OS including Linux and Mac OS X through the command shell “Bash” and allows hackers to essentially hijack a device including sending a malware, stealing private information and deleting files to name a few. 
The good thing is that the attack can only be executed when the system is not protected by a firewall, otherwise the hacker won’t be able to do remote execution of code. This means that for the most part, consumers are relatively safe from any attack; given of course they have a firewall in place.
However, this is not the case when it comes to servers and smart appliances. Unlike consumer devices, web servers need to listen to requests to execute its function. And the same goes with smart devices.
Fortunately, many software developers have already released patches that fix the issue. In fact, Red Hat and Ubuntu have already issued theirs and Apple is following suit. As for those who suspect that their “smart” appliances are running on a version of Linux, you should definitely give the manufacturer a call and ask if they will issue a patch related to the bug just to be safe.
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