Guard yourself against Shell Shock: Net security experts

Hackers are always at it—inventing new viruses and tricks to gain access to your data. The latest one ‘Shell Shock’ is going to cause immense losses if you are not vigilant enough, warn security experts.

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

“As of now we haven’t noticed any attacks on Indian infrastructure, however, we do expect attacks to rise in the next few weeks,” Govind Rammurthy, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of eScan, said in an email response on Wednesday.

"All the Unix-based operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X are likely to be affected with the Bash Shell Shock 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 has asked users to adopt sandboxing and process access control as another layer of security.

“The restricted sandbox ensures even trusted programmes perform required functions, thereby blocking any potential harm that an unknown program could cause,” the company said in an advisory on the Shell Shock 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.

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