New Linux Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities Give Attackers Full Root Control
Two newly discovered and interconnected Linux vulnerabilities — CVE-2025-6018 and CVE-2025-6019 — enable unprivileged attackers to escalate privileges to root across major Linux distributions. Affecting millions of systems globally, these flaws represent a severe and urgent security threat requiring immediate action. Overview of the Vulnerability Chain The vulnerability chain, uncovered by the Qualys Threat Research Unit , hinges on two distinct but related flaws that when exploited in sequence, allow full root access: CVE-2025-6018 — A misconfiguration in the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) on SUSE-based systems allows SSH users to be misclassified as local “active” users. CVE-2025-6019 — A flaw in the libblockdev library, accessible via the udisks daemon , grants root privileges to users in an “allow_active” context. Together, they form a dangerous privilege escalation chain, easily exploitable on systems with default configurations. CVE-202...