Dirty COW: The Linux kernel developer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, announced three new maintenance updates for Linux 4.8, 4.7 and 4.4 of the LTS kernel series, which fix a significant security vulnerability.
The Linux kernel vulnerability is known as “Dirty COW,” and is documented as CVE-2016-5195. In reality, it’s a very nasty bug that could be exploited by local users to write to any file even if it had read-only permissions.
The worst is that this particular security flaw has existed in the Linux kernel since at least the 2.6.x series, which reached end-of-life in February of the current year.
“This is an ancient bug that I tried to fix once, eleven years ago,” Linus Torvalds reveals in an email.
Naturally, anyone using Linux should upgrade their Kernel immediately..
