Kevin Backhouse:

I am a fan of Ubuntu, so I would like to help make it as secure as possible. I have recently spent quite a bit of time looking for security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu’s system services, and it has mostly been an exercise in frustration…

This blog post is about an astonishingly straightforward way to escalate privileges on Ubuntu. With a few simple commands in the terminal, and a few mouse clicks, a standard user can create an administrator account for themselves. I have made a short demo video, to show how easy it is.

This particular vulnerability is regarding the GUI, so your Ubuntu servers are unaffected. Still, 👀