Raspbian 2016-11-25 is now available for download

Dec 1, 2016 04:40 GMT  ·  By

Raspberry Pi Foundation, through Simon Long, announces that a security update is now available for the PIXEL desktop environment of the company's Debian-based Raspbian operating system for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.

You probably remember PIXEL, the work of Raspberry Pi Foundation's Simon Long during the past two years, which is now used by default in the latest images of the Raspbian distribution, instead of the old-school LXDE desktop environment, on which PIXEL is in fact based. Well, it now looks like Raspbian PIXEL was updated to version 1.1 with various bug fixes and security patches, and Raspbian 2016-11-25 image was released.

"With any major release of the OS, we usually find a few small bugs and other issues as soon as the wider community start using it, and so we gather up the fixes and produce a 1.1 release a few weeks later," says Simon Long. "We don’t make a fuss about these bug fix releases, as there’s no new functionality; these are just fixes to make things work as originally intended."

SSH is now disabled by default to increase security

Long story short, the new security update for Raspbian PIXEL is here to patch a security issue that could have been exploited by hackers to invisibly take control of Raspberry Pi devices and cause massive Internet blackouts like the one reported by numerous media outlets at the end of October. Therefore, SSH (Secure Shell) has been disabled by default, making it extremely hard to hijack a Raspberry Pi SBC.

However, you should not panic, your Raspberry Pi device is not being hacked, and Raspberry Pi Foundation has no knowledge of them being used in botnets or taken over in large numbers. However, it's still good practice to protect yourself and prevent such attacks by disabling SSH right now using the Raspberry Pi Configuration (raspi-config) application (see the attached image). Also, make sure that you always keep your Raspbian OS up to date by running the following commands in a terminal emulator.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install -y pprompt