DirtyCOW privilege escalation for Linux

In this recipe, we will use DirtyCOW to exploit Linux.

We will use Metasploit with the DirtyCOW vulnerability to provide privilege escalation. Dirty Copy-On-Write (DirtyCOW) was recently discovered and was a major vulnerability as it went for several years without being recognized and patched. DirtyCOW is a privilege escalation bug that exploits a race condition in the copy on write function. 

Getting ready

Let's ensure the following prerequisites:

• Your Kali VM is up and running
• Your Metasploitable VM is up and running and on the host-only network

How to do it...

We will now launch DirtyCOW against a Linux machine:

1. Open up a terminal window by clicking on the terminal icon: 
   
2. Enter the following commands to download our DirtyCOW exploit:

cd <enter>
wget https://github.com/FireFart/dirtycow/raw/master/dirty.c <enter>
nano dirty.c <enter>

3. From within nano, look for the section struct Userinfo user; and change the user.username to "dirtycow":

nano...