This recent kernel exploit has been spreading around the Internet quickly in recent days. So what is it, exactly? What is it really doing and how does it allow a cracker to exploit the root privileges in your system? Jonathan Corbet chimes in with one of the best overviews of the exploit, why it's a problem, how it got here, and what's being done to address it:

"Unlike a number of other recent vulnerabilities which have required special situations (such as the presence of specific hardware) to exploit, these vulnerabilities are trivially exploited and the code to do so is circulating on the net.

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