A pair of Google researchers recently released a vulnerability report on the GLIBC function “getaddrinfo”, which if exploited, could crash the system or even give a hacker command line control. (Yikes!!) MANY Linux systems are vulnerable to this so please patch your systems quickly. GLIBC packages affected by this are versions 2.9 and newer…2.9 was released way back in 2008, so you can see that the size of the affected systems is huge! Note…”getaddrinfo” is used by systems in resolving DNS names to an IP address. Talk about important…right??

To see what version of GLIBC you are using, simply run the command:  ldd –version

Here is an example from one of my test Linux systems at work…

Example of affected GLIBC package

As you can see, this system is running version 2.10.1 of GLIBC and needs to be patched. For CentOS (which I’m running), you can obtain a more detailed listing about GLIBC this way…

GLIBC info from my CentOS system

Most Linux distributors have patches ready to fix the issue, so running the appropriate update commands should take care of things. For CentOS, just run “yum update” and it will grab the fix and apply it…a reboot of your system will be required.

Related links…
Google announcement
SANS InfoSec Post