Ubuntu 18.04 switching back to GNOME, Broadcom WiFi chip vulnerabilities, and Brickerbot malware

Ubuntu 18.04 Default Desktop

In a post on the 5th of April, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the end of investments in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell, as well as Ubuntu 18.04 to ship out with GNOME desktop by default.

Further in the post, it states, Canonical’s focus will be IoT and the cloud.

For more;

Mark Shuttleworth:Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence

Broadcom Vulnerabilities

Millions of Apple and Android devices, which carry the Broadcom wifi chip, are vulnerable to over the air hacking.

Described as a stack buffer overflow, the vulnerability was discovered by Google’s project zero and is said to allow the execution of remote code on the affected devices.

For more;

TheHackerNews:Smart Phones Broadcom Wifi Chip Vulnerabilities

Brickerbot Malware Kills IoT Devices

Similar to Miria, the botnet malware that targets vulnerable IoT devices, Brickerbot uses the same TELNET bruteforce attack vector.

Brickerbot targets Linux based IoT devices running the BusyBox toolkit. Once inside the operating system, the code scrambles onboard memory, flushes IP and NAT tables, sets the outbound firewall rule to drop, and for the final nail in the coffin; tries to wipe all code on the affected devices.

For more;

TheRegister:Forget Miria, Here’s Brickerbot

Kernel Vulnerabilities Fixed In Ubuntu, Virgina Supreme Court:License Plate Surveillance, and Supertux Racer on Steam Greenlight

Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Linux 4.4 kernel. The recent update to 16.04.2 uses the 16.10 (Yakkety) Linux 4.8 kernel. So if you made the jump to 16.04.2 then check this out:
Ubuntu 16.10 Security issue
CVE-2016-9588 Discovered by Jim Mattson and Dmitry Vyukov, a flaw in the kernel’s implementation of KVM.
UbuntuFree:New Ubuntu Vulnerabilities

EFF Reports VA Supreme Court Should Protect Drivers from License Plate Surveillance

You can vote for Supertux Racer now at Steam Greenlight below.
Steam:Supertux Racer