Critical Flaw Found In Backtrack Linux

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting on a critical security flaw in the latest version of Backtrack Linux, a popular distribution that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The previously undiscovered privilege escalation hole was discovered by a student taking part in an InfoSec Institute Ethical Hacking class, according to the post on the group's Web site. 'The student in our ethical hacking class that found the 0day was using backtrack and decided to fuzz the program, as well as look through the source code,' wrote Jack Koziol, the Security Program Manager at the InfoSec Institute. 'He found that he could overwrite config settings and gain a root shell.' An unofficial patch is available from InfoSec Institute. Koziol said that an official patch is being tested now and is expected shortly."

Comments

Usually you run as root

[davidshewitt]

A fair number of the tools on backtrack have to be run as root. If you use the LiveCD or boot it from a flash drive (which is what I usually do), it instructs you to log in as root (with the default password of toor). Unless you were running Backtrack on a server with unpriviledged users, I don't see what the issue is. Just don't open any ports and you'll be fine (and if you're pentesting, why would you - you don't want to be detected).

Re:From what I heard

[Taco Cowboy]

Many other distros also carry wicd

Are other distros also affected?