This Week in Security: Another Linux Exploit, Ubuntu Knocked Offline, Finals Interrupted, and Backdoored Tools

After the CopyFail vulnerability gave root access from any user on almost all distributions last week, this week we’ve got DirtyFrag . This chains the vulnerability in CopyFail (xfrm-ESP) and a new vulnerability in a RPC function which allows similar overwriting of the page cache. Both vulnerabilities manipulate the Linux page cache where data from disk is stored for rapid access.