Easy-to-exploit rooting flaw puts Linux computers at risk

October 21, 2016 – 1:15 PM

The maintainers of Linux distributions are rushing to patch a privilege escalation vulnerability that’s already being exploited in the wild and poses a serious risk to servers, desktops and other devices that run the OS.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-5195, has existed in the Linux kernel for the past nine years. This means that many kernel versions that are used in a variety of computers, servers, routers, embedded devices and hardware appliances are affected.

The Red Hat security team describes the flaw as a “race” condition, “in the way the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handles the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings.” This allows an attacker who gains access to a limited user account to obtain root privileges and therefore take complete control over the system.

The vulnerability was fixed this week by the Linux kernel developers and patches for Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo and Suse, have been released or are in the process of being released.

The vulnerability, which has been dubbed Dirty COW by the security community, was discovered by security researcher Phil Oester when it was reportedly used in an attack against one of his servers. This suggests that attackers have known about the vulnerability and have exploited it in the wild for some time.

Source:
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3133965/security/easy-to-exploit-rooting-flaw-puts-linux-computers-at-risk.html