Raspberry Pi Foundation was fairly quick to release a patch to fix the infamous “Dirty Cow” bug for Raspberry Pi. The organisation has released Raspbian Jessie to overcome the issue.
Users on Raspberry Pi can get a secure experience through the Dirty Cow bugfix update. The Debian-based release can easily be installed on the single-board computer by executing following code from terminal.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-kernel
If you are unaware of Dirty Cow, it is a race condition in Linux kernel that allows local attackers to get administrative access. Linux maker Linus Torvalds had made an unsuccessful attempt to fix the bug 11 years ago. The vulnerability affects the copy-on-write mechanism in the kernel memory. Further, it so far opened a large number of opportunities for attackers.
All the devices running any Linux kernel version from 2005 are likely to be affected by Dirty Cow. Even more, it was recently reported that you could even root your Android device by leveraging this specific vulnerability.
Torvalds released a patch a few days back to fixed the Cow vulnerability and pushed an update to supported kernel branches. Canonical also pushed an update to address the issue on all Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems.
