Over 40% Ubuntu Systems Impacted by Severe Vulnerability; Check If You’re Affected

Jul. 29, 2023

As per the latest discovery by Security Researchers S. Tzadik and S. Tamari at Wiz, two new privilege escalation vulnerabilities, codenamed“GameOver(Lay)”in the popular Filesystem OverlayFS, affect a whopping 40% Ubuntu users across the globe. Check out the details for both of these vulnerabilities, along with the steps to check if your Ubuntu system is vulnerable or not.

Severe Linux Vulnerability Impacts Ubuntu Systems

“Subtle changes in the Linux kernel introduced by Ubuntu many years ago have unforeseen implications,”said Ami Luttwak, Wiz chief technical officer and co-founder.“We found two privilege escalation vulnerabilities caused by these changes and who knows how many other vulnerabilities are still lurking in the shadows of the Linux kernel spaghetti?”

“Fortunately, while these vulnerabilities would be easy to exploit, they require local user access, which should limit the attack surface”, said Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber.“Remote exploitation seems very unlikely. Ubuntu has released patches to address the issue, and deployments that utilize the affected OverlayFS module should update their kernel as soon as is practical,”Parkin added.

Use the following steps to check if your Ubuntu version is vulnerable or not.

1. Use this command to check the Ubuntu version installed on your system:

2. Now check for the kernel version number:

Fortunately, Canonical has released a new update as a fix for eight recent vulnerabilities. Follow these steps to update the system to the new kernel version 6.2.0:

1. First update and upgrade your Ubuntu system using the following command:

2. After a standard system update, you need to reboot your computer to apply the necessary changes.