{"id":1779,"date":"2016-10-25T21:14:53","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T03:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.supportpro.com\/blog\/?p=1779"},"modified":"2025-04-28T02:57:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T08:57:41","slug":"dirty-cow-vulnerability-cve-2016-5195","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.supportpro.com\/blog\/dirty-cow-vulnerability-cve-2016-5195\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Fix Dirty Cow Vulnerability – CVE-2016-5195"},"content":{"rendered":"

A serious vulnerability named Dirty COW<\/strong> has been discovered recently which has put the Linux kernel under risk. It is said that this vulnerability was noticed nine years ago (since version 2.6.22 in 2007) and remained unnoticed throughout this time. A researcher named Phil Oester was the man behind the detection of this serious threat.<\/p>\n

According to him, the vulnerability is described as a race condition where the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handles the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings.\u00a0In this way, the attackers gain write access to read-only memory updates and this paves the way to their increased privileges on the system. <\/p>\n

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It\u2019s a good chance that your device is vulnerable to this attack if you are running a Linux kernel higher than 2.6.22. The list given below shows the popular Linux distributions vulnerable to this attack.<\/p>\n