A vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux kernel that may lead
to privilege escalation. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
project identifies the following problem:

CVE-2009-2692
Tavis Ormandy and Julien Tinnes discovered an issue with how the
sendpage function is initialized in the proto_ops structure.
Local users can exploit this vulnerability to gain elevated
privileges.

For the oldstable distribution (etch), this problem has been fixed in
version 2.6.24-6~etchnhalf.8etch3.

We recommend that you upgrade your linux-2.6.24 packages.

Note: Debian ‘etch’ includes linux kernel packages based upon both the
2.6.18 and 2.6.24 linux releases. All known security issues are
carefully tracked against both packages and both packages will receive
security updates until security support for Debian ‘etch’
concludes. However, given the high frequency at which low-severity
security issues are discovered in the kernel and the resource
requirements of doing an update, lower severity 2.6.18 and 2.6.24
updates will typically release in a staggered or “leap-frog” fashion.