Ubuntu Linux impacted by decade-old 'needrestart' flaw that gives root

[Corrine]

From Bleeping Computer:

Five local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities have been discovered in the needrestart utility used by Ubuntu Linux, which was introduced over 10 years ago in version 21.04.

The flaws were discovered by Qualys and are tracked as CVE-2024-48990, CVE-2024-48991, CVE-2024-48992, CVE-2024-10224, and CVE-2024-11003. They were introduced in needrestart version 0.8, released in April 2014, and fixed only yesterday, in version 3.8.

Needrestart is a utility commonly used on Linux, including on Ubuntu Server, to identify services that require a restart after package updates, ensuring that those services run the most up-to-date versions of shared libraries.

See the blog post for additional information, including what to do to prevent the vulnerabilities from being exploited.

[Corrine]

From a post at SNF:

Fixed in Debian a couple of days ago - https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2024/msg00229.html