A bug lurking for 12 years gives attackers root on every major Linux distro

Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad news—a 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running any major distribution of the open source operating system.Previously called PolicyKit, Polkit manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes. It provides a mechanism for nonprivileged processes to safely interact with privileged processes. PwnKit, as researchers are calling the vulnerability, is also exploitable even if the Polkit daemon itself isn’t running.PwnKit was discovered by researchers from security firm Qualys in November and was disclosed on Tuesday after being patched in most Linux distributions.In an email, Qualys Director of Vulnerability Threat Research Bharat Jogi wrote:The most likely attack scenario is from an internal threat where a malicious user can escalate from no privileges whatsoever to full root privileges.