Dirty COW Linux Exploit | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Nearly a year after the disclosure of the Dirty COW vulnerability that affected the Linux kernel, cybercriminals have started exploiting the vulnerability against Android users, researchers have warned. Publicly disclosed last year in October, Dirty COW was present in a section of the Linux kernel—a part of virtually every Linux distribution, including Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu—for years and was actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability allows an unprivileged local attacker to gain root access through a race condition issue, gain access to read-only root-owned executable files, and permit remote attacks. However, security researchers from Trend Micro published a blog post on Monday disclosing that the privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195), known as Dirty COW, has now been actively exploited by a malware sample of ZNIU, detected as AndroidOS_ZNIU. This is the first time we have seen a malware sample to contain an exploit for the vulnerability designed...

A nine-year-old critical vulnerability has been discovered in virtually all versions of the Linux operating system and is actively being exploited in the wild. Dubbed " Dirty COW ," the Linux kernel security flaw (CVE-2016-5195) is a mere privilege-escalation vulnerability, but researchers are taking it extremely seriously due to many reasons. First, it's very easy to develop exploits that work reliably. Secondly, the Dirty COW flaw exists in a section of the Linux kernel, which is a part of virtually every distro of the open-source operating system, including RedHat, Debian, and Ubuntu, released for almost a decade. And most importantly, the researchers have discovered attack code that indicates the Dirty COW vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild. Dirty COW potentially allows any installed malicious app to gain administrative (root-level) access to a device and completely hijack it within just 5 seconds. Earlier this week, Linus Torvalds admi...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...