It's kind of a big deal, but not as big as the media is making it sound. You'd have to understand what bash is and how permissions work.
A hacker can't just locate my netbook on LAN and start asking it questions. The hacker wouldn't even get a response from my netbook. The same goes for most servers, but there are some exceptions. Even with those exceptions it can still be difficult.
Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not like Heartbleed. Heartbleed on a server would be exposed to the general public, because of oauth. "Shellshock", on the other hand, isn't exposed to the general public, unless your server or linux laptop is setup in a specific way to give outside users access to the exploit.
On shared hosting, all the websites are on the same virtual host. Using CGI scripting I can run bash commands and get everything I want, even crash the server, but I don't have access to other user accounts in the home folder. This isn't a bug. This is normal access. If I were to write a cgi script that gave users on the internet a text box that let them submit their own command lines they would be able to see everything on my account, because my useraccount owns the cgi script that created it. All the programs that the CGI script can run in bash would be subject to my user permissions, no matter what they pipe through them.
Krom wrote: So this chrome extension could definitely save your system from some drive by downloads if you use it properly even if it won't be quite as effective as NoScript.
Large professionally made extensions tend to lag my netbook. I don't know why they make them so large, but they do. They span hundreds of lines of code, for menus and have databases. Maybe I'm in the minority in 2014, but my only problem is with news sites. Most other sites use minimal javascript for assist the page, like this one.
Sergeant Thorne wrote:I don't use Chrome because Google is evil incorporated cleverly disguised as awesome.
The extension also works with Chromium.
Sergeant Thorne wrote: Also, while I would not claim to be a heavy surfer, it's not often that I feel the need to disable javascript.
My netbook, which is my only computer, can't handle six ajax processes firing off at once, which normally import more javascript. It's insane. News sites are the worst for me.