Thursday, June 11, 2009 10:41 AM
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Did a 0day push a man to suicide? – McAfee Avert Labs Blog
Did a 0day push a man to suicide?
Wednesday June 10, 2009 at 3:04 pm CST
Posted by Gaith Taha
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This is tragic news, indeed. We have heard of software flaws costing customers hefty amounts of money, man-hours, bandwidth, disk-space, etc. But now the cost has reached an unprecedented level causing HyperVM’s creator to apparently commit suicide. The problem started earlier this week when a large web host company which relied on HyperVM to manage their VPS had more than 100,000 websites of their customers destroyed by an attacker who utilized a 0day exploit in HyperVM. A few hours later, K T Ligesh, 32, the Bangalore-based developer was found dead on Monday leaving behind him plenty of worried customers who were left with their VPS installations unpatched. Vulnerability discovery in security research is of the utmost importance and so is ethical disclosure. Zero day vulnerabilities and their exploit counterparts can not only cost businesses money, but now it seems (if the reports are correct) they can also cost lives.
Our condolences to Mr. Ligesh’s family.
Filed under: Security and Anti-Virus, In the News, Internet News, Software Vulnerabilites