Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) is a critical phase in most attacks. Once an attacker has a foothold within a compromised Linux container, an LPE exploit is how attackers achieve root-level access, break out of the container, and cause additional harm. With vast and complex capabilities such as the Linux kernel (spanning 25M+ lines of code), it’s not surprising that LPE vulnerabilities are discovered regularly by attackers and security researchers alike.

Carl Jung is credited as having said “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong” (emphasis mine) which succinctly captures the essence of a lot of human thought, not least in cybersecurity. Pendulums are also great metaphors for human thinking because—like an idealized theoretical model of a pendulum—external forces don’t necessarily cause things to return to an equilibrium

Uncover the critical details of CVE-2024-1086, a notable Linux kernel vulnerability with far-reaching security implications.

Discover eBPF's journey as a game-changer in Linux security and observability, shaping today's digital security landscape.

CVE-2024-1086—a.k.a. Dirty Pagedirectory—is back in the news again and is an excellent demonstration of the limits of OS hardening and other “self-protection” mechanisms. It illustrates why modern runtime security can best be achieved by decoupling the method of protection from the object of protection. BlueRock achieves this separation with its groundbreaking workload protection platform.

The Pyramid of Pain has been an essential tool for defenders, but may place too much emphasis on detection and response and inadvertently marginalized prevention.