Get Permission A recently discovered 10-year-old bug, if exploited, could give hackers root access to vulnerable Linux and Unix operating systems, the security firm Qualys says. Security experts are urging users to immediately implement a patch to mitigate the risk. The vulnerability, called "Baron Samedit" by the researchers and officially tracked as CVE-2021-3156, is a heap-based buffer overflow in the Sudo utility, which is found in most Unix and Linux operating systems. Sudo is a utility included in open-source operating systems that enables users to run programs with the security privileges of another user, which would them give them administrative – or superuser - privileges.