The news comes on the exim mailing list, where a user posted that he had his exim install hacked via remote exploit giving the attacker the privilege of the mailnull user, which can lead to other possible attacks. A note up at the Internet Storm Center reminds exim users how to set up to run in unprivileged mode, and a commenter includes recompile instructions for Debian exim for added safety.

There is a widely held belief that Linux is a completely secure operating system. But to Brad Spengler of the grsecurity project, the belief is far from accurate. And he has the kernel exploits to prove it.

A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Ubuntu 8.10 Ubuntu 9.04 Ubuntu 9.10

A security bug in the latest version of the FreeBSD can be exploited to grant unprivileged users complete control over the operating system, a German researcher said Monday.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard about a problem with FreeBSD, partially because the mass of people using it isn’t that large and secondly because BSD tends to be pretty secure as operating systems go.

Palamida, the San Francisco company that helps companies to audit their use of open source software, has released a list of what it calls "the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities." To this list, Palamida has added an additional five vulnerabilities exclusively for Linux.com.

Though it might not seem that way, the top 10 most vulnerable software vendors - and, yes, that includes Microsoft - are contributing a smaller percentage of all vulnerability disclosures per year compared to five years ago.