The system could be made to run programs as an administrator.
It was discovered that a race condition existed in the memory manager of the Linux kernel when handling copy-on-write breakage of private read-only memory mappings. A local attacker could use this to gain administrative privileges.
20 October 2016
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
The system could be made to run programs as an administrator.
It was discovered that a race condition existed in the memory manager of the Linux kernel when handling copy-on-write breakage of private read-only memory mappings. A local attacker could use this to gain administrative privileges.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make all the necessary changes.
ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which requires you to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules you might have installed. Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic, linux-generic-lts-RELEASE, linux-virtual, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform this as well.
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