The vulnerability, a variety known as a race condition, was found in the way Linux memory handles a duplication technique called copy on write. Untrusted users can exploit it to gain highly privileged write-access rights to memory mappings that would normally be read-only. More technical details about the vulnerability and exploit are available here, here, and here. Using the acronym derived from copy on write, some researchers have dubbed the vulnerability Dirty COW.

Source: “Most serious” Linux privilege-escalation bug ever is under active exploit (updated)