Serious Dirty COW bug leaves millions of Linux users vulnerable to attack

A vulnerability discovered in the Linux kernel has been present for nine years, and users are being advised to seek out and install a patch as soon as they possibly can. Dubbed Dirty COW, the bug is a privilege escalation vulnerability which can be found in just about every Linux distro out there. Discovered by security expert Phil Oester, Dirty COW is described as one of the most serious bugs of its type ever found in Linux. Assigned the code CVE-2016-5195, there is evidence that the vulnerability has been exploited and a website set up to alert people to the… [Continue Reading]