With this one, if you’re lazy about keeping your computers up to date, you’re in trouble. This sudo heap-based buffer overflow can be exploited by any local user. Worse still, any Joe or Jane user can leverage it to elevate privileges to root, even if they’re not listed in the sudoers file. As the sudo programmers explained: Usually, when you run a sudo command in shell mode, you escape any special characters in the command’s arguments with a backslash. The sudoers policy plugin then removes the escape characters from the arguments before evaluating the sudoers policy. But, that same code will read beyond the last character of a string if it ends with an unescaped backslash character. Read Serious Sudo Trouble for Linux Distros via The New Stack An interesting link found among my daily reading