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Eagle-eyed researchers from streaming titan Netflix have uncovered several troubling security vulnerabilities within the TCP implementations on Linux and FreeBSD kernels. The most severe specimen, called SACK Panic, could permit an attacker to remotely induce a kernel panic within recent Linux operating systems.

A kernel panic is a kind of vulnerability where an operating system cannot easily recover – or, indeed, cannot recover at all. This could force a restart of a targeted host, causing a temporary shutdown in services.

Given Linux powers a variety of systems, from web servers to high-performance computing clusters, this is obviously really concerning.

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