Dirty Cow

Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) is a privilege escalation vulnerability that Linux Kernel has and exists since 2005. CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). The explanation why this can be referred as Dirty COW is as a result of a race condition that was found in Linux kernels memory subsystem, handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. That means that a local user that did not have the privilege, could use this flaw for gaining access to read only memory mappings.