For a high school science research course I did an epidemiological modeling study on how "good" reverse-worms might affect the spread of infection, they're a pretty interesting thought experiment. With something involving exponential growth like this, early movers have a significant advantage.
As far as I know, there hasn't been a successful reverse-worm that did not accidentally cause worse issues (flooding local networks with a high density set of boxes doing over-zealous scanning, or accidentally destroying boxes due to a slapdash narrowly tested script).
Reverse-worms they can either wait around, detecting requests from infected-but-not-patched systems to re-infect and patch them—or just start scanning IP ranges themselves. The former feels somewhat less pernicious. "Try to infect this computer, you will be patched and help patch." But that relies on other worms not patching their zombies.
Aside from the "it's not yours to fix" angle, you have to weigh the moral benefits of possibly patching the exploit, possibly crashing the application (I bet this is much more likely than a successful fix at this point), and wait-and-seeing whether the application owner patches the exploit on their own (along with the risk of a compromise in the mean time).
Edit: Of course there are a slew of legal issues with attempting this as well.
That's not benevolent that's intrusion. Nobody has the right to take it upon themselves to determine what someone else should be doing in this case. I would imagine that an action like that would also clearly violate a law or two (I'm sure others more knowledgeable could cite the law).
You encounter a car parked on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Its windows are rolled down. Storm clouds are rumbling nearby and it's obviously about to rain. There's nobody around but you.
Do you also consider rolling up the windows to be intrusion?
Personally I'd feel an ethical obligation to help the stranger out by preventing damage to his/her property. However I can completely understand people leaving well-enough alone.
Law aside, I'm much more on the fence about people automatically scanning for and "fixing" vulnerabilities, however. On one hand, how do you know you're really helping? On the other, as someone who's maintained a server or two, I'd rather be solving problems caused by a well-intentioned whitehat than miss problems caused by ill-intentioned blackhats.
Yes definitely. Really no different than if you would want someone to enter your house to close your windows.
Now you might say "well what if it can be done from the outside" without entering?
That is a bit different.
Except for one thing. What if someone saw you doing that? What if the owner saw you doing that and didn't know why you were messing with their car? (I had this happen with a boat one time btw.). There is an immediately sense of shock because you don't know what is going on. And in that case who knows what will happen? Maybe they might start a fight or shoot you. That's not good for anyone. Maybe they have something valuable in the car that they think you are going after. Maybe they have serious mental problems.
Here's the point. It's one thing if you see a baby in a hot car and decide to take action. The benefit outweighs the risks. But it's another thing if you decide to roll up the windows to prevent someone's car from getting wet inside (covered by homeowners insurance with low deductible in many cases ntim though). Different story. Make sense?
echo You are vulnerable to shellshock | wall
(Caveat: typically it has to be a certain user)
I'm ashamed to admit I used to think that was convenient. It makes systems infinitely more vulnerable in the event of an RCE bug.
> its not like this is a logged in ssh session
That's not correct -- whatever user is executing your CGI scripts is the "logged-in" user in bash, right?
Obviously that user should be quite locked down, and should not be allowed to run sudo at all, let alone without a password... but there are so many amateur server admins out there that I imagine there are quite a few servers where this is a serious problem (with or without sudo access enabled for the executing user).