7-Year-Old Samba Flaw Lets Hackers Access Thousands of Linux PCs Remotely
May 25, 2017
A 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in Samba networking software that could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected Linux and Unix machines. Samba is open-source software (re-implementation of SMB networking protocol) that runs on the majority of operating systems available today, including Windows, Linux, UNIX, IBM System 390, and OpenVMS. Samba allows non-Windows operating systems, like GNU/Linux or Mac OS X, to share network shared folders, files, and printers with Windows operating system. The newly discovered remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2017-7494 ) affects all versions newer than Samba 3.5.0 that was released on March 1, 2010. "All versions of Samba from 3.5.0 onwards are vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability, allowing a malicious client to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load and execute it," Samba wrote in an advisory published Wed