Evil

Filed under Free Software by adam | June 14, 2004 | 2 comments

I just tried ‘evil’, and to my dismay (but not surprise) my custom built kernel is vulnerable. My system locked before I could even see the results of having pressed ‘return’ after typing the ‘evil’ command.

If you’re in charge of a public Linux system, please get patches immediately—they’ve got one for 2.6.7-rc3 as well as 2.4.25 and 2.4.26.

I wonder if the mainstream press is going to pick up on this and say “Look, Linux is just as insecure as Windows!” It’s basically impossible to get the mass media to understand that even a major exploit like this one pales in comparison to any one of the dozens of trivial Outlook or IE cracks that are circulating.