Tenable Blog

Big data is everywhere. So is Bash, a command line interface found on most Linux and Unix machines. New Bash bugs are still being uncovered, with new patches coming out regularly. But hackers in the wild continue to look for and find ways to exploit Bash weaknesses. While most Unix-based systems had the Shellshock vulnerability, many of them were not immediately exploitable.

In my last post, I gave some reasons why your board of directors and senior management need to be involved in your security efforts. But obtaining and maintaining an acceptable or reasonable security posture requires effective security governance. Let’s look at how you assemble the most effective strategies and techniques to gain and maintain that support.

The best way to test for the Shellshock vulnerability is to do a credentialed local check against the Unix/Linux distribution. Nessus contains a number of plugins that make sure the operating system is patched. Nessus also has a plugin that performs a local test by invoking Bash, which covers just about any Unix/Linux platform available.

With Tenable’s Nessus, security and compliance teams can audit and inventory devices and software to identify what is malicious, abnormal or out-of-compliance. However, do you ever need to pinpoint the offending system or software to its user?

At Tenable, we’ve heard from customers who are looking for a unified framework that enables multi-vendor, cross-platform network system collaboration among IT infrastructure, network policy, identity and access management, and other IT operations.

A critical vulnerability in bash (Bourne Again SHell) versions through 4.3, the default shell for many Linux and other Unix distributions (including Mac OS X), presents a critical security concern for network-attached devices that use bash, especially those with an attack vector that can be exploited remotely (e.g., web servers, SSH servers, and likely much more). The key focus is that the attacker has to have a remote interface that will call bash to exploit the vulnerability. The bigger concern is that in the Unix world, that includes a lot of services.