Is this a singular incident, or the first of many?
You could argue this either way. It might be a one off blip, it might be the first of more to come. We shouldn't start to get worked up just yet. If there's another one of these before the year ends I'm going to stock up on coffee for the impending long nights.
Why now?
Why are we seeing this now? Linux and Apache have been running a lot of web servers for a very long time. Is there something different now that wasn't there before? Unpatched software isn't new. Ransomware is sort of new. Drive-by attacks aren't new. What is new is the amount of attention this thing is getting.
It is helpful that the author made a mistake so the technical analysis is more interesting that it would be otherwise. I wonder if this wouldn't have been nearly as exciting without that.
If this is the first of many, 2016 could be a long year. Let's hope it's an anomaly.
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