Vulnerability in Bash Shell widespread and serious

by
in security on (#2SWX)
Upgrade now, if you can. A bug discovered in the widely used Bash command interpreter poses a critical security risk to Unix and Linux systems - and, thanks to their ubiquity, the internet at large.

From the Register:
It lands countless websites, servers, PCs, OS X Macs, various home routers, and more, in danger of hijacking by hackers.

The vulnerability is present in Bash up to and including version 4.3, and was discovered by Stephane Chazelas. It puts Apache web servers, in particular, at risk of compromise: CGI scripts that use or invoke Bash in any way - including any child processes spawned by the scripts - are vulnerable to remote-code injection. OpenSSH and some DHCP clients are also affected on machines that use Bash.
Now is also a good time to wipe your servers and reinstall Minix or Plan9 as a precaution. ;)

mksh workalike (Score: 2, Interesting)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-25 11:44 (#2SX5)

If you don't need quite all the bash-isms, mksh is a great lightweight replacement, which is almost entirely drop-in compatible:

* http://mirbsd.de/mksh

I prefer mksh primarily because bash goes horribly brain-dead when you attempt line-editing on command lines that wrap-around to the next line. Your bash session becomes practically unusable after you hit that limit (which I do, often) and it first wigs-out:

* http://i.imgur.com/Vo2BQq2.png

It doesn't hurt that the mksh binary is 3.4X smaller, starts-up faster, is more responsive, can be statically linked, and doesn't hold open 28 files, all of which matters a lot in a minimal system recovery type situation.
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