Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Thu 20th Jan 2011 21:16 UTC
"In 2010, exploited Java vulnerabilities outpaced the exploit of Adobe Reader and Acrobat," Landesman, senior security researcher at Cisco, said. "Java was 3.5 times more frequently exploited than were malicious PDFs. That really spells out the need for paying attention to what's making the headlines but also paying attention to the types of things that aren't making the headlines."
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Member since:2011-01-21
It is more secure in a VM, but the problem here is that the VM itself (or at least older versions) is insecure.
As far as updating, one of the reasons that there are so many old, insecure JVMs out in the wild is the pure ridiculous number of corporate apps that somehow flat out refuse to run on anything but the version they were created with, which often end up being 1.5.
Member since:2005-11-13
As far as updating, one of the reasons that there are so many old, insecure JVMs out in the wild is the pure ridiculous number of corporate apps that somehow flat out refuse to run on anything but the version they were created with, which often end up being 1.5.
Sounds like IE6 all over again
lol That's the thing about corporate apps... somebody writes it, leaves the company (or was a contract programmer), and those left behind don't have a farking clue how it works.
Wonder how many hundreds of thousands of apps written in VB5/6 out there are still being used that were written in the mid-to-late 90's. Or anybody ever ran into one of those Excel macros from hell that was written about 15 years ago, and the entire company depends on?
Member since:2005-07-08
The main problem is that most JVMs are implemented in C or C++. The languages responsible for bringing a dark era of buffer overruns and pointer mis-indirections to mankind, thus starting an era of insecure software, which we still fight to recover from.
One just needs to create a clever designed sequence of bytes as a .class file that exploits a security issue in a specific JVM version. Then you release the exploit in the wild and for sure a few thousand users will be hit.
As for the users not updating it. It is really a big issue, in most corporate environments there is a big burocracy that you need to go through to update any software, even patch level versions.
Most corporate environments I know, the automatic updates are disabled, and updates are triggered by IT when they approved a certain software version.
Not to mention that recently I saw an offer for a project using Java 1.4 with Tomcat 4!
Features
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/29/13 21:06 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/24/13 22:24 UTC
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Member since:
2005-11-13
Only a few that I have seen, but not enough to bother with installing it. Flash is still a necessary evil, so I run it with flashblock on. Fortunately though, I've been able to get by without Java.
Wasn't one of the whole points of Java (besides the 'run everywhere thing, that doesn't really work so much) is that it was supposed to be more secure running in a VM?
Edited 2011-01-21 01:57 UTC