More than 5,000 computer server systems powered by Linux operating system are vulnerable to hacker attacks as they suffer the serious Dirty COW bug, a local security company has warned.

The vulnerability, which gets its name from the Linux sub-system called Copy-On-Write or COW, has been present in many versions of Linux for 9 years before it was detected last week.

Dirty COW is described as one of the most serious bugs of its type ever found in Linux. 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.

Ha Noi-based Bkav said 5,058 servers, including web and FTP (file transfer protocol) servers, are impacted by this serious bug.

Bkav said many attacks in which the Dirty COW vulnerability is exploited have been recently recorded.

“Hackers can exploit Dirty COW along with other hijacking methods such as SQL injection and Buffer Overflow to take the full control of the victim systems,” Bui Tien Dung, a system security expert with Bkav, said.

The Internet security firm advised users of Linux kernel version 2.6.22 and above update the patch to remove the vulnerability from their systems.

(Source: Tuoitrenews)