A nine-year-old critical vulnerability has been discovered in virtually all versions of the Linux operating system and is actively being exploited in the wild. The Linux kernel security flaw (CVE-2016-5195) is a mere privilege-escalation vulnerability, but researchers are taking it extremely seriously due to many reasons. The bug, marked as “High” priority, gets its name from the copy-on-write (COW) mechanism in the Linux kernel. The vulnerability disclosure followed the tradition of branding high-profile security vulnerabilities like Heartbleed FREAK, and GHOST.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/linux-kernel-exploit.html