The Haus

Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Pondering the Imponderable -- 8:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

If there's anything more geeky than compiling a new kernel, I'd like to know what it is. Actually the process isn't that hard. I am now running on a freshly compiled 2.4.23 kernel, which fixes a kind of nasty kernel exploit that was recently discovered (see this Slashdot article for the details). It appears that you need local access to exploit it though. Still, better safe than sorry. Nice to know that this bug was patched well before an exploit was found. It just shows that all OSes are vulnerable to exploits like this. The difference is how quickly they are dealt with.

The Master comments: Actually, this bug has been exploited before the kernel updates were widely published -- the Debian server compromise used this kernel bug to gain access to a slew of Debian systems.

A.T. Hun comments: Of course, the only way they were able to use the exploit was because one of the Debian developers' password had been compromised.

News for 12/02/2003

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