An error in the handling of special netlink messages in the Linux kernel can allow a user to surreptitiously gain root privileges. The discoverer of the hole, Mathais Krause, confirmed to The H's associates at heise Security that Linux kernel versions 3.3 to 3.8 are affected.
These are used by, among other things, Fedora 17, 18 and Ubuntu 12.10. Red Hat and SUSE are unaffected as they have not ported the code in question back to the older kernels their distributions are based on.

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