Linux distributions are rushing to patch a privilege escalation vulnerability that’s already being exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-5195, has existed in the Linux kernel for the past nine years. It allows an attacker who gains access to a limited user account to obtain root privileges and therefore take complete control over the system. This is a local privilege escalation flaw that cannot be directly exploited by remote attackers, so attackers need to first obtain limited access to the server in some other way to take advantage of it.”]