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Shellshock BASH probe alert using Fail2ban

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

"Shellshock" is the nickname for a recently discovered vulnerability in GNU BASH (Bourne-Again SHell) that has the potential to allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands through carefully crafted environment variables (see CVE-2014-6271). This is bad for desktop users, but far worse for servers because it's possible to exploit this vulnerability by attacking CGI scripts. The CGI script doesn't even have to be written in BASH; on distributions that use BASH as the default shell, the environment variables will be passed to BASH before any CGI script is executed. Luckily, the default shell in Debian is DASH, which limits the problem for Debian derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian. If you run a Linux or UNIX-like system that uses BASH, you should update to the new patched version now. In fact, most Linux users probably updated before they even realised anything was wrong, since the patched version was available in the repositories very quickly. Meanwhile, Mac users were still waiting for Apple to comment... lol.