Canonical/Ubuntu have been under DDoS(status.canonical.com) |
Canonical/Ubuntu have been under DDoS(status.canonical.com) |
In the UK they have this issue called "TV pickup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup). TV pickup is where everyone in the UK watching a popular TV show gets up to boil a high-powered tea kettle at the same time on an ad break. This causes a temporary surge in electricity demand and leads to real outages. It was a mystery at first but now is accounted for.
I suspect the global internet is facing an "agent pickup" problem where significant changes (e.g., releases of new frontier models or new package versions) puts unpredictable pressure on arbitrary infrastructure as millions of distributed agents act to address the change simultaneously.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/05/01/canonical_confirms_ub...
"Canonical says its web infrastructure is under attack after a pro-Iran hacktivist group instructed its members to target the open source giant."
Perhaps more to do with extortion rather than activism. (I have no idea how accurate theregister is on this story.)
Has Ubuntu published patches yet?
(Love the tv pickup story. I also thought of that, in other situations)
Um, no.
I daresay you could find the odd example, as for any grid in a stressed situation, but it's not like we turn to each other every week in the dark and say "Oh, it must be half time at the Manchester United match".
Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975729 - May 2026 (59 comments)
This might be the incentive I need to finally purge snap.
I used to have to find a script to purge excess old snaps that would fill up my hard drive. Now Ubuntu only keeps two versions of each snap.
I was wondering why the script didn't have to ever clean more than one version, even when I took longer between running updates.
The plot thickens...
The copy.fail website is very silly, it is not a special bug. If anyone gets compromised by that vuln their node architecture was broken anyway, patching copy.fail doesn't help.
How would "node architecture" make people vulnerable to this?
You have to have shell access to a victim first right? Or am I missing something?
> This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to upload arbitrary files on the affected site's server which may make remote code execution possible.
So, upload and execute a script that loads Copy Fail and even if you're only executing as www-data or another restricted user that "can't" sudo -- suddenly, uid=0!
To repeat the refrain... I'm so tired.
[0] https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2026/04/attackers-actively-ex...
What constitutes "special" for you, out of curiosity? Something chaining with a hypervisor exploit?
But it's not set during the Superb Owl flush isn't because the film is set in London, and most Londoners do not watch American football.
Now, I worry about the linux user mount namespace code... because I run the steam client which valve forces people to have in their kernel because they don't want/know how to craft "correct" ELF64 binaries, namely "-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++" compiling/linking options, maximizing static linking refactoring a bit source code with the pre-processor to avoid symbol collisions.
If you are running Ninja Forums you need to run it in its own VM so that if it gets compromised _you don't care if it has uid=0_.
You need to do that regardless of copy.fail. Now that you've patched copy.fail, there are loads and loads of other vulns that can be used the same way.
Flatpak gives me cross-platform/cross-distro software directly/certified by the project or company that has additional security sandboxing and doesn't open up potential security issues.
I don't have to wait for a distro package, and yet there are no system integration concerns.
It also works great for atomic distros (SilverBlue, etc)
Even just in AF_ALG there have been several such vulns fixed in 2026 already. Kernel wide probably hundreds. It's true that most of them will be harder to exploit than this one but that just means you need to prompt your AI a bit harder to get an exploit. (To be fair, in a lot of cases it's gonna be hard to escalate privs without crashing the machine).
Ubuntu has userns restrictions now which takes away the main sources of LPEs (random qdiscs, nftables, all that garbage) but there are still huge numbers of these vulns. This is why platforms that do native untrusted code executions have extreme sandboxing. Note Android and ChromeOS aren't affected coz they already knew this code was broken and hide it from unpriv workloads.
You can't run untrusted code on Linux without either a very very carefully designed sandboxing layer (like Android/ChromeOS) or virtualization. copy.fail is just one among tens of thousands of reasons for this, and it's a pretty uninteresting one at that.
What is "special" depends on your usecase but for my job it's mostly about stuff that's exposed to KVM guests. Biggest source of concerning vulns for us is probably vhost. I expect there are also lots of undiscovered and scary vulns in places like virtiofs, vfio, DAX, and wherever we do device passthrough.
> I could find any places running containered services and exfiltrate secrets parallel services, no?
Yes. Regardless of copy.fail. Cloud providers don't do that without a VM layer. (If yours does, you need to switch).
Also even if it's not strong, it doesn't mean it's entirely worthless. You can't rely on it, but it's usually free and it still buys you time / increases attack cost.
Like, if you leave 100k cash in a car on the street in SF, that's dumb. If you really need to do that for some strange reason, you should hire a security guard to watch your car, because cars a not a good security boundary. BUT, that doesn't mean you would leave the car unlocked just coz someone's watching it!
Clouds use VMs as the security barrier, which is also not always 100% perfect, but is much better.
It could be useful as part of an exploit chain but generally once you've got to local code execution it's not going to be difficult to get further.
A "special" bug would be something that defeats a security barrier that people actually use, e.g. something that works remotely, or as you say - a hypervisor hack.
Look at the CVE database. Most of those UAFs are LPE. Many of the OOBs and many of the race conditions too. These are fixed in Linus' master but you are running an old kernel.
Then look at the KASAN reports on the syzkaller dashboard. Many of them are LPE. Many of the WARNs and crashes are revealing and underlying bugs that is also an LPE. Most of these never get fixed.
Then try pointing your LLM at the codebase and saying "find an LPE". It will find as many as you want (you will exhaust your tokens long before it stops finding bugs). 99.99% of them will be bogus so you need a way to evaluate them at scale, currently this is the weakest approach but we'll get better at it.
I can't actually point you to a list of confirmed LPEs coz the only way they get confirmed is when someone exploits them, but there aren't enough exploit authors to do this for all of them. If inference gets really cheap and someone builds a really good agent harness we might start to see it get automated at some point.
They're the only main distro I know of that uses it at all by default.
Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc. Ubuntu is the only one.
I have to say that I really do not understand the point of comments like this.
The reality of user-facing Linux is this:
Most of it is Android. It sells billions of units per year.
Of the rest, something like 90% is ChromeOS. That recruits 2-3 hundred million new hardware sales a year, which is roughly 10x as many users annually as the entire history of the Linux distro world. ChromeBooks sell more than desktop PCs and more than Macs by value although Macs cost at least 5x as much.
But of the remaining, oh let's be generous and say 10% of Linux users, most is Ubuntu.
Debian-based distros are 2/3 to 3/4 of all traceable measurable Linux usage, and 2/3 of Debian-family use is Ubuntu.
Red Hat and its fantastic valuation is like 1% of the Linux world.
So what you are saying is "only the Linux mainstream uses snap, and all the weird little hacker/hobbyist distros that have like ten users don't use it."