10-25-2016
Here's a news clip from the UK. (BBC Copyright acknowledged)
Users of the Linux operating system are being urged to update it to remove a "serious" bug that hackers could use to hijack systems.
Known as the Dirty Cow bug, the vulnerability has been present in many versions of Linux for almost a decade.
The warnings come as malicious hackers start exploiting it to take over vulnerable computers.
The vulnerability gets its name from the Linux sub-system, called Copy-On-Write or COW, in which it appears.
Updated versions of Linux that no longer suffer the bug are now being widely distributed. Millions of computers, including a majority of web servers, run Linux or one of its variants.
"The nature of the vulnerability lends itself to extremely reliable exploitation," Dan Rosenberg, a security researcher at Azimuth Security, told tech news site Ars Technica. He added that it was the "most serious" bug of its type ever found in Linux.
The vulnerability allows attackers to steadily increase the amount of control they can exert over a target system.
Security expert Graham Cluley said the bug was of a type that did not normally prompt action because they were less likely to be exploited. However, he said, Dirty Cow should be taken seriously because there was some evidence that it was being actively abused.
Attack code that capitalised on the weakly protected sub-system was captured by developer Phil Oester as it was used in an attempt to take over a server he runs.
Mr Oester told the V3 tech news site that the vulnerability was easy to use and was "almost certain" to be more widely used by cyberthieves.
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NEWS(1) USER COMMANDS NEWS(1)
NAME
news - display system news
SYNOPSIS
news [-adDeflnpvxs] [[article1] [article2] ..]
DESCRIPTION
The news command keeps you informed of news concerning the system. Each news item is contained in a separate file in the /var/lib/sysnews
directory. Anyone having write permission to this directory can create a news file.
If you run the news command without any flags, it displays every unread file in the /var/lib/sysnews directory.
Each file is preceded by an appropriate header. To avoid reporting old news, the news command stores a currency time. The news command con-
siders your currency time to be the date the $HOME/.news_time file was last modified. Each time you read the news, the modification time of
this file changes to that of the reading. Only news item files posted after this time are considered unread.
OPTIONS
-a, --all
Display all news, also the already read news.
-d, --datestamp
Add a date stamp to each article name printed. this can only be used with the -nl flags.
-D, --datefmt <fmt>
Specify a date format, see the strftime(3) man page for more details. the default format is (%b %d %Y)
-f, --newsdir <dir>
Read news from an alternate newsdir.
-l, --oneperline
One article name per line.
-n, --names
Only show the names of news articles.
-p, --page
Pipe articles through $PAGER or more(1) if the $PAGER environment variable is not set.
-s, --articles
Reports the number of news articles.
MAINTAINER OPTIONS
-e, --expire #
Expire news older than # days.
-x, --exclude a,b,c
A comma separated list of articles which may not be expired. if a file named .noexpire exists in the /var/lib/sysnews direcory,
filenames are read from it also. names in this file may be comma separated, and/or one per line.
AUTHOR
Charles, <int@link.xs4all.nl>
Linux 18 January 1995 NEWS(1)