A high-severity vulnerability in sudo has been patched in a number of Linux distributions; the flaw allows local attackers to elevate privileges to root.

A local, race condition vulnerability in the af_packet implementation in Linux was patched this week. The bug allows a local attacker to execute code or crash a server.

A privilege escalation vulnerability, nicknamed Dirty Cow and present in Linux since 2007, has been used in public attacks against web-facing Linux servers.