covering the week's top tech stores
with a slight linux bias ubuntu has
fixed a handful of bugs that standard
users could use to become root
ubuntu developers have fixed a series of
vulnerabilities that made it easy for
standard users to gain coveted
root privileges kevin backhouse a
researcher at github wrote in a post
published last tuesday
with a few simple commands in the
terminal and a few mouse clicks
a standard user can create an
administrator account for themselves
the first series of commands triggered a
denial of service bug in daemons used to
manage user accounts on the computer
when done correctly ubuntu would restart
and open a window that allowed the user
to create a new account
that had root privileges this is the
setup screen that you would normally see
when you're installing ubuntu for the
first time
it means that junior is able to create a
new user account for himself
and this time it's going to be an
administrator account
all done so now he just has to wait a
few more seconds
and he's in here he's going to quickly
open a terminal again so that he can run
id to show that the new account
called indiana is an administrator
account
so there you can see that indiana is in
the sudo group which means that he's an
administrator
the second bug involved in the hack
resided in the gnome display manager
which among other things manages user
sessions and the login screen
the display manager also triggers the
initial setup of the os when it detects
no users currently exist
since it verifies whether an account
exists or not by asking
accounts damon if that damon is locked
up it will think there are no accounts
the vulnerabilities could be triggered
only when someone had access to
and a valid account on a vulnerable
machine
it worked only on desktop versions of
ubuntu
maintainers of the open source ubuntu os
patched the bugs
last week big thanks to roy w nash and
our community of viewers for submitting
stories to us this week
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tv newsroom i'm becca ferguson
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