Two Critical MySQL Bugs Discovered (infoworld.com)

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Two critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities in MySQL, MariaDB, and PerconaDB can help take control of the whole server, which is very bad for shared environments... Administrators need to check their database versions, as attackers can chain two critical vulnerabilities and completely take over the server hosting the database... The first vulnerability, a privilege escalation/race condition flaw, gives elevated privileges to a local system user with access to a database and allows them to execute arbitrary code as the database system user. This gives an attacker access to all of the databases on the affected server... The privilege escalation/race condition flaw can be chained with another critical vulnerability, a root privilege escalation vulnerability, to further elevate the system level user to gain root on the server.

Comments

High performance is no use with poor functionality

[Viol8]

Sure , MongoDB is fast. But having used it after spending years with relational DBs my opinion of it is its a little more than a toy thats one step up from a flat file and is bascially a throwback to what existed back in the 70s before RDBs came along.

If all you want is a key value store then knock yourself out, but if you want proper relational operations - and don't say they're not important, they damn well are in any serious business data - then forget it. Mongo has some relational operators hacked in and the latest versions can do a piss poor simulcra of a join between collections but these can't use an index so are essentially useless for high speed operations. Also Mongo doesn't support transactions making dirty reads possible and hence its useless for simultanious multiclient operations on critical data. And don't get me started on its hideous bastard stepchild of javascript command line making even the simplest query a PITA exercise in bracket counting.

"MongoDB will run circles around MySQL because MongoDB is web scale."

Dishing up noddy website data is pretty much all its any use for.

Re:WTF

[XXeR]

MySQL runs a thread or process as root? Why?

It doesn't. Read the hack, it's using a symlink attack on error.log to gain access to an arbitrary root owned file.

Old news (even for Slashdot)

[Zontar The Mindless]

Both of these vulnerabilities were fixed in MySQL two months ago. I assume MariaDB and Percona have long since applied the patches as well.

So the big takeaway here is, "If you've not upgraded to the latest release yet, why the hell not?"