As you may already know, recently a vulnerability in the Linux kernel, known as Dirty Cow, was reported. Our dedicated system administrators immediately addressed the vulnerability patching all vulnerable Linux powered servers against the exploit. Read on to learn more about Dirty Cow and the steps we took to protect our systems.

How does the exploit work?

In short, Dirty Cow is a privilege-escalation vulnerability that allows any installed application, or malicious code smuggled onto a box, to elevate their privileges to that of root-level. For those of you that would like to dive deeper into the workings of the exploit, we recommend an article published by The Register.

Why is it called Dirty Cow?

The mechanism within the Linux kernel that is vulnerable is called Copy-On-Write, which when abbreviated spells COW.

Is my Linux powered server vulnerable?

No, our system administrators have patched all servers. This means that the latest CentOS kernels have been installed and machines have been rebooted where necessary in order to ensure they are not vulnerable.

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