Ubuntu | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Details have emerged about a new, unpatched local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability impacting the Linux kernel. Dubbed Dirty Frag , it has been described as a successor to Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431, CVSS score: 7.8), a recently disclosed LPE flaw impacting the Linux kernel that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability was reported to Linux kernel maintainers on April 30, 2026. "Dirty Frag is a vulnerability (class) that achieves root privileges on most Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write vulnerability and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write vulnerability," security researcher Hyunwoo Kim (@v4bel) said in a write-up. "Dirty Frag is a case that extends the bug class to which Dirty Pipe and Copy Fail belong. Because it is a deterministic logic bug that does not depend on a timing window, no race condition is required, the kernel does not panic when the exploit fails, and the success rate is very high." T...

A high-severity security flaw affecting default installations of Ubuntu Desktop versions 24.04 and later could be exploited to escalate privileges to the root level. Tracked as CVE-2026-3888 (CVSS score: 7.8), the issue could allow an attacker to seize control of a susceptible system. "This flaw (CVE-2026-3888) allows an unprivileged local attacker to escalate privileges to full root access through the interaction of two standard system components: snap-confine and systemd-tmpfiles," the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) said . "While the exploit requires a specific time-based window (10–30 days), the resulting impact is a complete compromise of the host system."  The problem, Qualys noted, stems from the unintended interaction of snap-confine, which manages execution environments for snap applications by creating a sandbox, and systemd-tmpfiles, which automatically cleans up temporary files and directories (e.g.,/tmp, /run, and /var/tmp) older than a defined ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two security flaws in the Sudo command-line utility for Linux and Unix-like operating systems that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines. A brief description of the vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2025-32462 (CVSS score: 2.8) - Sudo before 1.9.17p1, when used with a sudoers file that specifies a host that is neither the current host nor ALL, allows listed users to execute commands on unintended machines CVE-2025-32463 (CVSS score: 9.3) - Sudo before 1.9.17p1 allows local users to obtain root access because " /etc/nsswitch.conf " from a user-controlled directory is used with the --chroot option Sudo is a command-line tool that allows low-privileged users to run commands as another user, such as the superuser. By executing instructions with sudo, the idea is to enforce the principle of least privilege, permitting users to carry out administrative actions without the need for el...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws that could be exploited to gain root privileges on machines running major Linux distributions. The vulnerabilities , discovered by Qualys, are listed below - CVE-2025-6018 - LPE from unprivileged to allow_active in SUSE 15's Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) CVE-2025-6019 - LPE from allow_active to root in libblockdev via the udisks daemon "These modern 'local-to-root' exploits have collapsed the gap between an ordinary logged-in user and a full system takeover," Saeed Abbasi, Senior Manager at Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), said . "By chaining legitimate services such as udisks loop-mounts and PAM/environment quirks, attackers who own any active GUI or SSH session can vault across polkit's allow_active trust zone and emerge as root in seconds." The cybersecurity company said CVE-2025-6018 is present in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap ...

Two information disclosure flaws have been identified in apport and systemd-coredump , the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU). Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598 , both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems. "These race conditions allow a local attacker to exploit a SUID program and gain read access to the resulting core dump," Saeed Abbasi, manager of product at Qualys TRU, said . A brief description of the two flaws is below - CVE-2025-5054 (CVSS score: 4.7) - A race condition in Canonical apport package up to and including 2.32.0 that allows a local attacker to leak sensitive information via PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces CVE-2025-4598 (CVSS score: 4.7) - A race condition i...

Multiple decade-old security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the needrestart package installed by default in Ubuntu Server (since version 21.04) that could allow a local attacker to gain root privileges without requiring user interaction. The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), which identified and reported the flaws early last month, said they are trivial to exploit, necessitating that users move quickly to apply the fixes. The vulnerabilities are believed to have existed since the introduction of interpreter support in needrestart 0.8 , which was released on April 27, 2014. "These needrestart exploits allow Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) which means that a local attacker is able to gain root privileges," Ubuntu said in an advisory, noting they have been addressed in version 3.8. "The vulnerabilities affect Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions." Needrestart is a utility that scans a system to determine the services that need to be restarted a...

Details have emerged about a vulnerability impacting the "wall" command of the util-linux package that could be potentially exploited by a bad actor to leak a user's password or alter the clipboard on certain Linux distributions. The bug, tracked as CVE-2024-28085, has been codenamed  WallEscape  by security researcher Skyler Ferrante. It has been described as a case of improper neutralization of escape sequences. "The util-linux wall command does not filter  escape sequences  from command line arguments," Ferrante  said . "This allows unprivileged users to put arbitrary text on other users' terminals, if mesg is set to "y" and wall is setgid." The  vulnerability  was introduced as part of a  commit  made in August 2013.  The "wall" command is used to write a message to the terminals of all users that are currently logged in to a server, essentially allowing users with elevated permissions to  broadcast key information  t...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible for threat actors to exploit a well-known utility called command-not-found to recommend their own rogue packages and compromise systems running Ubuntu operating system. "While 'command-not-found' serves as a convenient tool for suggesting installations for uninstalled commands, it can be inadvertently manipulated by attackers through the snap repository, leading to deceptive recommendations of malicious packages," cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Installed by default on Ubuntu systems, command-not-found  suggests  packages to install in interactive bash sessions when attempting to run commands that are not available. The suggestions include both the Advanced Packaging Tool ( APT ) and  snap packages . While the tool uses an internal database ("/var/lib/command-not-found/commands.db") to suggest APT packages, it relies on the " advise-snap " comman...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two high-severity security flaws in the Ubuntu kernel that could pave the way for local privilege escalation attacks. Cloud security firm Wiz, in a  report  shared with The Hacker News, said the easy-to-exploit shortcomings have the potential to impact 40% of Ubuntu users. "The impacted Ubuntu versions are prevalent in the cloud as they serve as the default operating systems for multiple [cloud service providers]," security researchers Sagi Tzadik and Shir Tamari said. The  vulnerabilities  – tracked as CVE-2023-2640 and CVE-2023-32629 (CVSS scores: 7.8) and dubbed  GameOver(lay)  – are present in a module called  OverlayFS  and arise as a result of inadequate permissions checks in certain scenarios, enabling a local attacker to gain elevated privileges. Overlay Filesystem refers to a union mount file system that makes it possible to combine multiple directory trees or file systems into a single, unif...

A German security researcher has publicly disclosed details of a serious vulnerability in one of the most popular FTP server applications, which is currently being used by more than one million servers worldwide. The vulnerable software in question is ProFTPD , an open source FTP server used by a large number of popular businesses and websites including SourceForge, Samba and Slackware, and comes pre-installed with many Linux and Unix distributions, like Debian. Discovered by Tobias Mädel , the vulnerability resides in the mod_copy module of the ProFTPD application, a component that allows users to copy files/directories from one place to another on a server without having to transfer the data to the client and back. According to Mädel, an incorrect access control issue in the mod_copy module could be exploited by an authenticated user to unauthorizedly copy any file on a specific location of the vulnerable FTP server where the user is otherwise not allowed to write a file. ...

An unknown hacker yesterday successfully managed to hack into the official GitHub account of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux project and created 11 new empty repositories . It appears that the cyberattack was, fortunately, just a "loud" defacement attempt rather than a "silent" sophisticated supply-chain attack that could have been abused to distribute modified malicious versions of the open-source Canonical software. In a statement, David from Canonical confirmed that attacker(s) used a Canonical owned GitHub account whose credentials were compromised to unauthorizedly access Canonical's Github account. "We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities," David said. "Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organization in GitHub and is still investigating the extent o...

Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions suffer from a severe privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow a local attacker or a malicious program to obtain root privileges and total control over the targeted system. Dubbed " Dirty_Sock " and identified as CVE-2019-7304 , the vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Chris Moberly, who privately disclosed it to Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, late last month. The vulnerability resides in the REST API for snapd service , a universal Linux packaging system that makes an application compatible for various Linux distributions without requiring any modification. Built by Canonical, snapd comes by default installed on all versions of Ubuntu and also used by other Linux distributions, including Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Solus, and Fedora. Snap packages are basically applications compressed together with their dependencies that also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software o...

Hold tight, this may blow your mind… A low-privileged user account on most Linux operating systems with UID value anything greater than 2147483647 can execute any systemctl command unauthorizedly—thanks to a newly discovered vulnerability. The reported vulnerability actually resides in PolicyKit (also known as polkit)—an application-level toolkit for Unix-like operating systems that defines policies, handles system-wide privileges and provides a way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones, such as "sudo," that does not grant root permission to an entire process. The issue, tracked as CVE-2018-19788 , impacts PolicyKit version 0.115 which comes pre-installed on most popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat , Debian ,  Ubuntu , and CentOS. The vulnerability exists due to PolicyKit's improper validation of permission requests for any low-privileged user with UID greater than INT_MAX. Where, INT_MAX is a constant in computer progra...

An Indian security researcher has discovered a highly critical flaw in X.Org Server package that impacts OpenBSD and most Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, and Fedora. Xorg X server is a popular open-source implementation of the X11 system (display server) that offers a graphical environment to a wider range of hardware and OS platforms. It serves as an intermediary between client and user applications to manage graphical displays. According to a blog post published by software security engineer Narendra Shinde , Xorg X server doesn't correctly handle and validate arguments for at least two command-line parameters, allowing a low-privileged user to execute malicious code and overwrite any file—including files owned by privileged users like root. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-14665 , was introduced in X.Org server 1.19.0 package that remained undetected for almost two years and could have been exploited by a local attacker on the terminal or vi...

A cybersecurity researcher with Google Project Zero has released the details, and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a high severity vulnerability that exists in Linux kernel since kernel version 3.16 through 4.18.8. Discovered by white hat hacker Jann Horn, the kernel vulnerability (CVE-2018-17182) is a cache invalidation bug in the Linux memory management subsystem that leads to use-after-free vulnerability, which if exploited, could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the targeted system. The use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities are a class of memory corruption bug that can be exploited by unprivileged users to corrupt or alter data in memory, enabling them to cause a denial of service (system crash) or escalate privileges to gain administrative access on a system. Linux Kernel Exploit Takes an Hour to Gain Root Access However, Horn says his PoC Linux kernel exploit made available to the public "takes about an hour to run before popping a root shell....

Microsoft's love for Linux continues… Microsoft has released its command-line shell and scripting language PowerShell Core for Linux operating system as a Snap package, making it easier for Linux users to install Microsoft PowerShell on their system. Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft has made PowerShell Core available to the Ubuntu Snap Store as a Snap application. PowerShell Core is a cross-platform version of Windows PowerShell that is already available for Windows, macOS, and Linux OS and has been designed for sysadmins who manage assets in hybrid clouds and heterogeneous environments. Snap is a universal Linux packaging system, built by Canonical for the Ubuntu operating system, which makes an application compatible for all major Linux distributions without requiring any modification. A Snap package is basically an application compressed together with its dependencies and also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software on various Linu...

Windows and Linux in the same line? Yes, you heard that right... and that too, on the same computer and within the same operating system. Two months ago, Microsoft announced its plans to let its users install three different flavours of the Linux operating system – Ubuntu , Fedora , and SUSE – directly through their Windows Store, allowing them to run Windows and Linux apps side-by-side. Now, downloading an entire operating system has just become as easy as downloading an application with the availability of popular Linux distro 'Ubuntu' in the Windows App Store . However, unlike a conventional Ubuntu installation, this Ubuntu version runs in a sandboxed alongside Windows 10 with limited interaction with the operating system and is focused on running regular command-line utilities like bash or SSH as a standalone installation through an Ubuntu Terminal. For now, Ubuntu is currently only available to Windows 10 Insiders users and would be made available to the pub...

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Systemd , the popular init system and service manager for Linux operating systems, that could allow remote attackers to potentially trigger a buffer overflow to execute malicious code on the targeted machines via a DNS response. The vulnerability, designated as CVE-2017-9445 , actually resides in the ' dns_packet_new ' function of 'systemd-resolved,' a DNS response handler component that provides network name resolution to local applications. According to an advisory published Tuesday, a specially crafted malicious DNS response can crash 'systemd-resolved' program remotely when the system tries to lookup for a hostname on an attacker-controlled DNS service. Eventually, large DNS response overflows the buffer, allowing an attacker to overwrite the memory which leads to remote code execution. This means the attackers can remotely run any malware on the targeted system or server via their evil DNS service...

Microsoft has been expressing its love for Linux and Open Source for almost three years now, and this love is embracing as time passes. Just last year, Microsoft made headlines by building support for the Bash shell and Ubuntu Linux binaries into Windows 10, allowing users to run limited instances of Linux directly on top of the OS without installing any virtual machine, as well as developers to run command-line tools while building apps. Now, Microsoft has announced at its Build developer conference in Seattle that three different flavors of the free Linux operating system are coming to the company's app store, so its users can run Windows and Linux apps side-by-side. Yes, it's no joke. Three versions of Linux distributions – Ubuntu, Fedora, and SUSE – are coming to the Windows Store. Now, you'll soon be able to install these Linux operating systems on your Windows device just like any other app. While Ubuntu is already available on the Windows Store for a...