"Shellshock" Bug to make an Impact

Bash (Bourne-Again Shell) is a piece of software that is built into over 70 percent of machines such as servers, computers, routers, and some mobile phones. Rumor has it that Bash contained a software bug (Shellshock) that could be used to take over millions of machines around the world. Shellshock is the offspring of the Heartbleed bug that was discovered last spring in many software’s. The key difference between the two crucial bugs is that, Heartbleed stole passwords from servers, while Shellshock is much more of a threat than that. It can take over an entire machine. According to New York times, click here Heartbleed "went unnoticed for two years and affected an estimate 500,000 machines, but shellshock was not discovered for 22 years." Many think that it’s surprising that a bug could go unnoticed for two decades, but not to programmers. Researchers say it would be more difficult for this bug to reach your personal laptop rather than one that is connected to the server due to the fact that people would have to join a public network that hackers knew you were connected to in order for them to work. In order for these bugs to be fixed, Mr. Bellovin, a computer science professor, states that in order for this bug issue to be solved, the open source community has to be less consumed with the new features rather than quality. Quality is more important than the new features and those skills need to be developed or it’s going to fall behind the quality race and technology will start to decline drastically.