Enlarge (credit: Victorgrigas ) A raft of Unix-based operating systems—including Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD—contain flaws that let attackers elevate low-level access on a vulnerable computer to unfettered root. Security experts are advising administrators to install patches or take other protective actions as soon as possible. Stack Clash, as the vulnerability is being called, is most likely to be chained to other vulnerabilities to make them more effectively execute malicious code, researchers from Qualys, the security firm that discovered the bugs, said in a blog post published Monday . Such local privilege escalation vulnerabilities can also pose a serious threat to server host providers because one customer can exploit the flaw to gain control over other customer processes running on the same server. Qualys said it’s also possible that Stack Clash could be exploited in a way that allows it to remotely execute code directly. “This is a fairly straightforward way to get root after you’ve already gotten some sort of user-level access,” Jimmy Graham, director of product management at Qualys, told Ars. The attack works by causing a region of computer memory known as the stack to collide into separate memory regions that store unrelated code or data. “The concept isn’t new, but this specific exploit is definitely new.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Serious privilege escalation bug in Unix OSes imperils servers everywhere
NASA said Monday it has found new evidence of 219 planets outside our Solar System. Ten of those exoplanets appear to be similar to the size of the Earth and orbit their stars in the habitable zone. From a report: The new planets’ existence must still be double-checked. But Kepler’s latest haul — which includes a planet that is only slightly larger than Earth and receives the same amount of energy from its sun as Earth — is the latest triumph for Kepler, which has spotted roughly 80 percent of the planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Because of their potential for hosting life, the 10 Earth-size planets are the most glamorous of the newly announced planets from Kepler. But those 10 were joined by an additional 209 more garden-variety planets that are unlikely to be hospitable to life because they are too gassy, too hot, too cold or otherwise unlike the only known planet to host life: Earth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.