A vulnerability has been discovered in the Sudo linux utility that can allow any users (even those with relatively low privileges) so execute commants with root privileges – a simple and immediately ‘privilage escalation’.
The most worrying thing is that this vulnerability is vintage, starting to appear in a version of sudo rolled out as long ago as 2011 meaning it can be found in many distributions.
While admittedtly, a threat actor still needs an active user account, it can be any type and standard level user accounts tend to have less safeguards and be less protected than administrative accounts.
In the video below, the researches going by the hande of ‘Baron Samedit’ demonstrates an exploit of the vulnerability: