Ubuntu Linux has a worrying security flaw that may have gone unseen for a decade

• Security researchers find multiple flaws in service introduced a decade ago
• The flaws allow malicious actors to escalate privileges and run arbitrary code
• A patch is available, and users are urged to apply it

Ubuntu Linux has been carrying multiple high-severity vulnerabilities for a decade, allowing malicious actors the ability to escalate their privileges to root without user interaction, experts have warned.

Cybersecurity researchers Qualys found the bugs in the OS utility feature called ‘needrestart’, a utility that checks which services need to be restarted after an update or a change in the system’s libraries or binaries.

It is particularly useful after applying security updates or upgrading packages, as it ensures that the updates are effectively applied without requiring a full system reboot.

Exploitable vulnerabilities

Needrestart is capable of identifying services using outdated libraries, prompting to restart them, and recommending a system reboot when necessary. As a result, it helps maintain the security and stability of a system without needing frequent reboots.

It was introduced in 2014 and maintained as a Debian package. It was vulnerable since the day of its inception, with Ubuntu Linux version 21.04. The five vulnerabilities in question are tracked as CVE-2024-48990, CVE-2024-48991, CVE-2024-48992, CVE-2024-10224, and CVE-2024-11003. Needrestart’s earliest vulnerable version is 0.8, and earliest clean version is 3.8, released earlier this week.

More details about the vulnerabilities can be found here, but in short – they allow crooks to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems. The only prerequisite is that they have local access, either through malware, or compromised accounts.

While this sounds like a solid mitigation, BleepingComputer reminds that attackers exploited similar Linux elevation of privilege flaws in the past, as well.

One notable example is Loony Tunables, which exploited the nf_tables bug. Needrestart is an extremely popular, and widely used feature, and hackers will most likely now try to exploit it. Therefore, it is…