Linux security flaws Dirty Frag and Copy Fail are a good reminder to stay up to date

Have you run your Linux distribution updates recently? You probably should, because Dirty Frag and Copy Fail are coming for you. Two major Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) security issues have been revealed in a short time, which is not ideal.

For Copy Fail that was revealed at the end of April, the website describes it simply enough for you:

"An unprivileged local user can write 4 controlled bytes into the page cache of any readable file on a Linux system, and use that to gain root"

That's pretty bad. There's thankfully some patches rolling out across different distributions for it.

And now we also have Dirty Frag, which has been fully revealed early due to an embargo being broken and so Linux distribution developers will need to scramble to get patches ready for it. The impact is very similar to Copy Fail, enabling an attacker to gain root access to your system to do whatever they feel like.

However, a quick workaround (taken from the Dirty Frag disclosure) can be done as noted to protect yourself via terminal:

sh -c "printf 'install esp4 /bin/false\ninstall esp6 /bin/false\ninstall rxrpc /bin/false\n' > /etc/modprobe.d/dirtyfrag.conf; rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc 2>/dev/null; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; true"

This is a special case, because no current patches exist. It should be fine to run on any distribution.

Keep a close eye on updates coming in over the next week, you're going to need them.