When attackers take advantage of an exploit, one of their first goals is to gain superuser (root or administrator) access to the compromised system. If the compromised process is already running with ...

There was a time when real system administrators just logged into Unix systems as root. But as we all know — with great power comes great responsibility. It’s too easy to do terrible things when you ...

We’re likely all familiar with the phrase “treating the symptoms”. We don’t want our doctors prescribing pain killers any time we suffer from some kind of discomfort. We want them to uncover and ...

There was a time when, to use a computer, you merely turned it on and were greeted by a command prompt. Nowadays, most operating systems offer a security model with multiple users. Typically, the ...

The 'sudo' keyword in Unix and Linux allows users to execute certain commands with special-access privileges that cannot otherwise run on a given machine by a user with a lower level of clearance.

The bug allows users to bypass privilege restrictions to execute commands as root. A vulnerability in Sudo, a core command utility for Linux, could allow a user to execute commands as a root user even ...

The power to grab root privileges is the ultimate evil in Unix and Linux systems. Kevin Backhouse, a member of the GitHub Security Lab, found the polkit security hole in the course of his duties. He ...

A vulnerability in the Linux sudo command has been discovered that could allow unprivileged users to execute commands as root. Thankfully, this vulnerability only works in non-standard configurations ...