FAQ

What is the CVE-2016-5195?

CVE-2016-5195 is the official reference to this bug. CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is the Standard for Information Security Vulnerability Names maintained by MITRE.

Why is it called the Dirty COW bug?

"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." (RH)

What makes the Dirty COW bug unique?

In fact, all the boring normal bugs are _way_ more important, just because there's a lot more of them. I don't think some spectacular security hole should be glorified or cared about as being any more "special" than a random spectacular crash due to bad locking.

Anyone sharing or have details about the "in the wild exploit"?

An exploit using this technique has been found in the wild from an HTTP packet capture according to Phil Oester.