CVE-2016-5195: Dirty COW
Race Condition: Is CVE-2016-5195 real, exploitable, or a false positive? Here's the community verdict.
Community verdict: No field verdicts yet. Be the first practitioner to weigh in.
signals
public sources
Confirmed exploited in the wild. Patch this first, regardless of the base score.
cisa ssvc
CISA Vulnrichment · assessed
CISA decision, by how critical the affected system is to you:
- low impact → Track
- medium impact → Attend
- high impact → Act
Track: normal patch cycle · Track*: watch closely · Attend: patch sooner · Act: patch now. About SSVC ↗
public exploits
links to sources — we don’t host codeA working exploit is publicly available from a maintained source. Treat this as higher urgency and verify your exposure.
baseline read
auto · not a community verdict
Real — exploited in the wild
CISA confirms active exploitation. Treat scanner hits as true positives unless your specific version or config is unaffected.
Based on CISA KEV
Confirm or dispute →CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Race condition in mm/gup.c in the Linux kernel 2.x through 4.x before 4.8.3 allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging incorrect handling of a copy-on-write (COW) feature to write to a read-only memory mapping, as exploited in the wild in October 2016, aka "Dirty COW."
References
Published · Added to CISA KEV (1939 days after publication)
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Community ground truth
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In your experience, is this finding real and exploitable?
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Field notes & remediation
Verdicts are the quick signal. Notes are the evidence and fixes behind them.
- 0
A race condition in the Linux kernel's copy-on-write handling lets any local user overwrite files they should only be able to read, which gives a reliable path to root. It is local only, so it is high rather than critical, but the exploit is rock solid and it became the standard next step after landing any shell on an unpatched Linux box.
Who is affected: Linux systems on kernels from around 2007 up to the October 2016 fix.
How to check: compare the running kernel version against your distro's patched version. Any old, unpatched kernel where untrusted users can run code should be treated as exploitable.
Commonly flagged by: Nessus, Qualys, OpenVAS, Trivy.
- 0
Patch the kernel to your distro's fixed build and reboot so the new kernel loads. There is no real userspace workaround, this is a kernel fix. On systems you cannot reboot right away, limit who can run code locally until you can.
Add a field note or remediationoptional
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