In the world of computer security, there are more and more vulnerabilities that cybercriminals seek to exploit. Insecurities in the systems and loopholes through which they can enter to steal data and corrupt the network. Although it is often believed that Linux is a system that practically cannot be attacked, this is not the case and it does have vulnerabilities and problems that can endanger computers. And so it has happened.
In recent days, a new concern has arisen about a vulnerability in Linux systems that has been called Looney Tunables. A vulnerability that affects several Linux distributions and not just one in particular and that can affect thousands of users of the penguin operating system.
What happened?
A new security vulnerability has been discovered in Linux that poses significant risks to some distributions of the operating system. This security flaw, identified as CVE-2023-4911, has been discovered in the ld.so dynamic loader of the GNU C library. This flaw causes an overflow in the processing buffer of the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable, which causes the vulnerability in the system.
This problem could have serious consequences, allowing a cybercriminal to escalate privileges on the system by accessing root remotely. Qualys has been in charge of reporting the details of this vulnerability, noting that it was introduced in April 2021.
What is GNU C
GNU C is a media library, also known as glibc, it plays a vital role in Linux-based systems and provides essential functions such as opening files, reading, writing, allocating memory, printing, loading libraries, and obtaining address information, among others. further.
Well, the glibc dynamic loader, responsible for preparing and executing programs, is compromised by this vulnerability. Which offers the attacker the possibility of escalating privileges in the system until obtaining root privileges, which means total control of the system. So we can get an idea of ​​the importance of this vulnerability.
These are the affected distributions
This flaw is a significant threat to some of the most used Linux distributions such as Fedora 37 and 38, Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.04 and Debian 12 and 13. In addition, they warn that other distributions could also be affected by this vulnerability and could be at risk. , although there is one that is not affected by this problem and that is Alpine Linux, which by using the libc musl library instead of glibc, is not affected by the vulnerability.
The manager of the Qualys Threat Research department, Saeed Abbasi, has highlighted the importance of the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment, designed to optimize applications linked to glibc. Misuse of this environment can cause a negative impact on system performance and security.
Furthermore, this is not the only vulnerability in Linux systems. Looney Tunables joins a series of privilege escalation bugs that were discovered years ago, including CVE-2021-33909, CVE-2021-3156, CVE-2021-3560 and CVE-2021-4034.
How to protect ourselves
Although there is nothing we can do about this Linux vulnerability if it has affected us, we can protect ourselves against possible problems that may arise in the future. Linux is usually an operating system with fewer threats or vulnerabilities than Windows but, as we can see, they exist. That is why we should always take a series of precautions to protect ourselves, such as the type of files we install, the websites we visit or the updates we make to the computer.
Although there are fewer compatible ones than for other operating systems, you can use some antivirus for Linux such as ESET NOD32 for Linux if you want a paid option or others like Avast Core Security which is also compatible with the penguin operating system and will protect us in all cases. distros against possible errors or vulnerabilities.
