It’s a fact most of the people wouldn’t like to admit, but we humans have this major tendency to create double-edged swords in the name of innovation. If we look around, almost everything we rely on to move our life forward on a day-to-day basis has some sort of shortcoming. It can be argued that the positives of our creations outweigh the negatives, hence these products of our imagination still fall more on the right side than the wrong one, but that’s not the case all the time. Sometimes the consequences of these testaments of innovation are so grave that they nullify any positives we might have pulled out of a creation or were hoping to do so. Also, it must be noted that this fact cannot be deemed as an anomaly as the list of products that fall into this category is too big to qualify as mere exceptions. One of the prominent names on this list can be read as ‘cyberspace’.
Now, it might feel a little stupid to put such a helpful component of our lives on this list, but this phenomenon called cyberspace is far from flawless. Behind its efficient and pleasing to the eye façade, cyberspace has been loaded with flaws. These flaws find their way to the surface time and again, leaving serious devastation behind them whenever they do so. Millions of have witnessed such defects coming back to bite, and the victim count has only been bolstered by US’s cybersecurity catastrophe that is still going on, with its latest target being e-commerce giant, WooCommerce. It was recently revealed that a critical SQL-injection security vulnerability in the WooCommerce platform along with a related plugin came under attack as a zero-day bug.
As per the reports, the bug could have potentially permitted the cybercriminals in without proper screening of the access, thus offering no protection to a huge amount of information that ranged from customer personal information and banking details to employee credentials. WooCommerce currently supports over a whopping 5 million websites across the globe, hence the effects of the hack attempt instantly gained an astounding reach and spread panic amongst the site owners.
When asked about the extent of exploitation that the attack caused, the WooCommerce maintained that their investigation is still going on and any updates regarding the same will be communicated to the site owners directly.