Linux OS has a serious flaw that could easily lead hackers to your electronic devices, a team of security researchers has discovered.
According to the researchers, the flaw arises from how the operating system handles its server requests; something they believe could leave millions of devices vulnerable to hackers. The vulnerability affects the GNU C library, which happens to the main source code of Linux OS.
Google and Red Hat already on it
As we speak, Google and Red Hat are already on this case and a patch has been released to fix the issue and its related bugs. However, since the unveiled software updates need to be tested extensively before they can be released, it could take some time before Linux systems administrators apply the changes.
According to security experts, the main impact of this flaw appears to be when the system makes a request to a DNS server and the response is large. With the help of this knowledge, hackers could come up with a unique DNS response that could easily result in crashed device or even execute a code on your system. The problem gets more sensitive in that with Linux operating systems, DNS servers are core components, thus, if affected, the effect will be felt across multiple applications.
This is not the best news for lovers of Linux OS. In addition, researchers claim that this flaw could easily affect any OS that depends on the GNU C library. With this mind, be careful just in case you are using phones, tablets and other mobile devices or apps built using Python, PHP as well as Ruby on Rails.
At the moment, it cannot be determined the impact of this flaw to Android devices. Android does use GNU C library, however, it uses an adapted version of the same known as Bionic which apparently, may not be as vulnerable.
Is Linux losing its ‘secure’ profile?
This is not the first time this vulnerability has been highlighted. According to the Google engineers behind the research, some programmers were already onto the subject. In fact, they discovered a similar bug back in July 2015.
Linux has been known to be one of the most secure operating systems in today’s tech environment. As a result, it is used to power most mobile devices. With this vulnerability, which happens to be a second major one discovered in less than a month, it casts doubts on whether this OS is still the go-to option as far as security is concerned.