Linux Systems Patched for Critical glibc Flaw

Linux users today are scrambling to patch a critical flaw in the core glibc open-source library that could be exposing systems to a remote code execution risk. The glibc vulnerability is identified as CVE-2015-7547 and is titled, "getaddrinfo stack-based buffer overflow."

The glibc, or GNU C Library, is an open-source implementation of the C and C++ programming language libraries and is part of every major Linux distribution. Google engineers came across the CVE-2015-7547 issue when they were attempting to connect into a certain host system and a segmentation fault (segfault) occurred, causing the connection to crash. Further investigation revealed that glibc was at fault and the crash could potentially achieve an arbitrary remote code execution condition.