Researchers at Nebula Security disclosed GhostLock, a Linux kernel flaw that lets any logged-in user gain full root on an unpatched machine, and it also escapes containers. Tracked as CVE-2026-43499, the bug has shipped by default in essentially every mainstream distribution since 2011 and needs no special permissions or network access; ordinary threading calls from any local program are enough. Nebula built a working exploit it says is 97 percent reliable and published the code, though no in-the-wild use is known yet. There is no full workaround, patch availability is uneven across distributions, and one earlier fix introduced a separate crash bug, so confirm the fixed package version.
Researchers disclosed closely related Linux kernel flaws in the traffic-control subsystem that let an unprivileged local user gain root, and working exploits appeared within a day of disclosure. The main bug, nicknamed pedit COW (CVE-2026-46331), is an out-of-bounds write in the packet-editing action that corrupts shared page-cache memory; a related variant tracked as DirtyClone (CVE-2026-43503) was demonstrated by JFrog. Rather than touching files on disk, the exploit poisons the cached copy of a setuid root program like /bin/su in memory and runs the altered version as root, so file-integrity checks still pass. Exploitation needs the act_pedit module loadable and unprivileged user namespaces enabled, both common defaults on RHEL and Debian.
TrustStrike Labs