Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, September 13th, 2016 edition of the Sandstone Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from Las Vegas, Nevada.

Now, we all know to be somewhat careful with results if you get back from Google in particular,

if you're searching, for example, for downloads for popular software.

Rob ran into this issue when he looked for a PDF to Doc X converter,

so essentially converting a PDF to a Microsoft Word file,

and a few of the results he got back when he looked at free converters

on Google actually added malware to his document. Three out of the first five converters that

he tried out did add exploit kits to the document that they converted from the PDF.

And then of course in the end all he had to do was actually open the PDF, invert and save

it as a Word document and he states that actually worked pretty well. He lost some of the graphics

but for the particular application that he had, that didn't matter.

So Google, for the most part, actually now got rid of a lot of the very common kind of bad links.

For example, when you searched for things like Adobe PDF reader downloads,

you used to get a lot of malware.

Not so much of that is happening these days, but then of course these secondary downloads

that people don't really do that often, they apparently still slip between the cracks.

One common way to trigger privilege escalation vulnerability is if a

less privileged user is able to modify an executable or a configuration file that's then being

executed by the more privileged user, the administrator. There is a newly documented issue here with MySQL.

Now, in MySQL, you have typically the safe MySQL process,

that's sort of a demon that runs as root in the background,

...