Users are urged to update their systems immediately

Oct 25, 2016 23:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, October 25, 2016, CentOS maintainer and lead developer Johnny Hughes informed the community of the server-oriented Linux-based operating system about the availability of an important kernel update for CentOS 7.

Today's CentOS Errata and Security Advisory 2016:2098 is marked as important, and users of the CentOS 7 Linux distributions are urged to update the kernel packages to version kernel-3.10.0-327.36.3.el7.x86_64 as soon as possible. As expected, the new version addresses the infamous "Dirty COW" vulnerability patched upstream in the Linux kernel 3.10.104 LTS maintenance release.

"A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel's memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. An unprivileged, local user could use this flaw to gain write access to otherwise read-only memory mappings and thus increase their privileges on the system. (CVE-2016-5195, Important)," reads the RHSA-2016:2098-1 security advisory from Red Hat.

The new kernel update is also available upstream in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 7), Red Hat Enterprise Linux HPC Node (v. 7), Red Hat Enterprise Linux HPC Node EUS (v. 7.2), Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7), Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server AUS (v. 7.2), Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server EUS (v. 7.2), and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 7) products.