Dirty COW

Computers and devices that still use the older kernels remain vulnerable. The original exploit sample leveraging this vulnerability was discovered by Phil Oester during the investigation of a compromised machine. The author of this sample is still unknown. Because of the race condition, with the right timing, a local attacker can exploit the copy-on-write mechanism to turn a read-only mapping of a file into a writable mapping. Although it is a local privilege escalation, remote attackers can use it in conjunction with other exploits that allow remote execution of non-privileged code to achieve remote root access on a computer. The attack itself does not leave traces in the system log. The vulnerability has the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures designation CVE-2016-5195. Dirty Cow was one of the first security issues transparently fixed in Ubuntu by the Canonical Live Patch service.