Under active exploit
There is a critical bug, Dirty COW, present virtually on all GNU/Linux distributions, under active exploit since 9 years ago.
Security researchers, while this is a privilege-escalation vulnerability, are taking it extremely serious for many reasons: first of all, it seems that is not so hard to develop an exploit based on it. But there’s another problem: this bug is located in part of the Linux kernel which has been present in almost every distribution of the OS for almost a decade.
Last but not least, researchers have found that the vulnerability is being actively and maliciously exploited.
We know that kernel developers already knew this bug, and that tried to fix it eleven years ago. However, the fix was undone for technical reasons.
In the time we write, a patch has already been written and released from the maintainers of the official kernel tree. Phil Oester, the man who found it, urges to distribute and install the patch.
Red Hat has classified it as important and has already planned to address it in future updates.
For a curious case, this happen in the same week in which a Google researcher showed that the average lifetime of a Linux bug is five years.
Remember to take it seriously and update all the kernels you have control on.
