Guard yourself against ‘Shellshock’, say Internet security experts

Hackers are never tired in inventing new viruses and tricks to gain access to your data. The latest one ‘Shellshock’ is going to cause immense losses, if you are not vigilant enough, warn security experts.

Though the experts have not noticed major intrusions in India, they said it is time we take pre-emptive measures to keep the spread of the attacks.

“As of now we haven’t noticed any attacks on Indian infrastructure, however we do expect attacks to rise in next few week,” Govind Rammurthy, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of eScan, has said in an email response. “All the Unix-based operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X are likely to be affected with the Bash Shellshock vulnerability,” he said.

The anti-virus solutions firm has launched an online tool to identify servers affected by the latest vulnerability.

First identified in September, the bug lets the hacker remotely execute malicious code to break into the computers.

Internet security solutions company Symantec asked the computer users to adopt sandboxing and process access control as another layer of security.

“The restricted sandbox ensure even trusted programs perform required functions, therefore blocking any potential harm that an unknown program could cause,” the company said in an advisory on the Shellshock threat.

It also asked the organisations to implement file and system tamper prevention allowing the system administrator to customise and lock down configurations, settings and files.

COMMENT NOW