Most reported Linux “security” bugs actually aren’t Linux bugs. For example, security vendor CrowdStrike‘s report on the biggest Linux-based malware families was really about system administration security blunders with telnet, SSH, and Docker, not Linux at all. But, that doesn’t mean Linux doesn’t have security holes. For example, a new nasty Linux kernel problem has just popped up.
In this one, there’s a heap overflow bug in the legacy_parse_param in the Linux kernel’s fs/fs_context.c program. This parameter is used in Linux filesystems during superblock creation for mount and superblock reconfiguration for a remount. The superblock records all of a filesystem’s characteristics such as file size, block size, empty and filled storage blocks. So, yeah, it’s important.