Critical Vulnerability Silently Patched in Linux Kernel

"A highly dangerous privilege escalation vulnerability, which can allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code as root from any GUI application, has been patched in the Linux kernel.

"The flaw was discovered by Rafal Wojtczuk, principal researcher at Invisible Things Lab (ITL), a security research company based in Poland.

"According to Joanna Rutkowska, founder of ITL, the bug was discovered while Mr. Wojtczuk was working on GUI virtualization in Qubes OS, an operating system developed by the company, in which every application runs in a separate virtual machine."

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