Story
Copy Fail – CVE-2026-31431
1 report
1 website
1 discussion
Latest report
Overview
Copy Fail is a logic flaw that allows for local privilege escalation on Linux systems without the need for a race window or kernel-specific offsets. A 732-byte Python script can exploit this flaw to gain root access on every Linux distribution released since 2017, functioning unmodified across multiple systems.
Summary from copy.fail.
Reports
One report so far. Additional coverage will appear here when it is linked to this story.
Community reactions
Each reaction summarizes sampled comments from the linked discussion.
Hacker News · copy.fail
Hacker News discussion ↗
Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
Analysis ready
Read this discussion’s reaction
Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-04-30.
- Praise: The vulnerability appears to be real and poses a high risk, prompting necessary security updates across affected systems.
- Praise: The discovery of this vulnerability contributes meaningfully to the open-source software ecosystem, highlighting the importance of security in AI applications.
- Concern: Claims of the exploit escaping containers lack supporting evidence, raising doubts about its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.
- Concern: The assertion that the script roots every Linux distribution since 2017 is misleading, as it has only been tested on a few and fails on others like Alpine.
- Concern: The vulnerability is being treated as a medium risk by many distros, despite its potential for local root privilege escalation, which should be prioritized higher.