Dealing with the discovery of new software flaws, even those that leave users open to serious security exploits, has long been a part of everyday life online. But few years have seen quite so many bugs, or ones quite so massive. Throughout 2014, one Mothra-sized megabug after another sent systems administrators and users scrambling to remediate security crises that affected millions of machines. Several of the bugs that shook the Internet this year blindsided the security community in part because they weren’t found in new software, the usual place to find hackable flaws. Instead, they were often in code that’s years or even decades old. In several cases the phenomenon was a kind of perverse tragedy of the commons: Major vulnerabilities in software used for so long by so many people that it was assumed they had long ago been audited it for vulnerabilities. Each of those major bug finds in commonly used tool, he says, inspired more hackers to start combing through legacy code for more long-dormant flaws. And in many cases, the results were chilling. Here’s a look at the biggest hacker exploits that spread through the research community and the world’s networks in 2014.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 17:01:18 +0000
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