A bug in Linux kernel that was discovered two years ago has been recognised as a potential local privilege escalation flaw. Researchers at Qualys Research Labs has now found that this vulnerability could be exploited to escalate privileges and it affects all major Linux distributions. The vulnerability resides in the way Linux kernel loads ELF executables, which potentially results in memory corruption. Users can switch to the legacy mmap layout by setting VM.legacy_va_layout to 1, which will effectively disable the exploitation of this security flaw.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/linux-kernel-hacking.html