Two new flaws are affecting the security of systems running various Linux distributions.

“One of the flaws gives a remote attacker the ability to crash vulnerable systems and the other leads to root privileges for a local attacker,” writes threatpost’s Dennis Fisher.

“The most serious of the new vulnerabilities is a remote denial-of-service bug in the Linux kernel related to the way that the system handles large packets,” Fisher writes. “During the IPv4 defragmentation process, the Linux kernel fails to handle oversized packets correctly, which causes the system to crash. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to crash systems running the vulnerable versions of Linux.”

Click here to read the threatpost story.