Zero-Day Exploit Leads to Apparent Suicide

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 that relied on HyperVM to manage their VPS had more than 100,000 websites of their customers destroyed by an attacker who used a zero-day exploit in HyperVM. A few hours later, K. T. Ligesh, the 32-year-old 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 cannot 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.