Linux bug leaves USA Today, other top sites vulnerable to serious hijacking attacks

ronjor · Aug 10, 2016

Dan Goodin - Aug 10, 2016 6:26 pm UTC

Computer scientists have discovered a serious Internet vulnerability that allows attackers to terminate connections between virtually any two parties and, if the connections aren't encrypted, inject malicious code or content into the parties' communications.
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summerheat · Aug 11, 2016

That ArsTechnica prominently labelled that as a Linux bug is actually a bit misleading. In the article itself they correctly mention:

The vulnerability resides in the design and implementation of RFC 5961, a relatively new Internet standard that's intended to prevent certain classes of hacking attacks. In fact, the protocol is designed in a way that it can easily open Internet users to so-called blind off-path attacks, ...

The problematic RFC 5961 has not yet been fully implemented in Windows or Mac OS X, so those operating systems aren't believed to be vulnerable. By contrast, the Linux operating system kernel, starting with version 3.6 introduced in 2012, has added a largely complete set of functions implementing the standard. Linux kernel maintainers released a fix with version 4.7 almost three weeks ago, but the patch has not yet been applied to most mainstream distributions.
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So it's actually not a Linux bug but a design weakness of that RFC. Other OS's were just lucky as they hadn't implemented it so far.

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Linux bug leaves USA Today, other top sites vulnerable to serious hijacking attacks

ronjor Global Moderator

summerheat Registered Member

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Linux bug leaves USA Today, other top sites vulnerable to serious hijacking attacks

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