alt Hacker NewsThe high number is really impression to the point of making me skeptic. Are these distinct vulnerabilities or are a lot of the related in the way vulns often are?
The article says "The target virtual machines ran a stock desktop operating system". Are the vulns in the kernel specifically or does this include software running as root?
These are distinct vulnerabilities counted by the number of patches. The patch generation system performs variant analysis. So, each patch can potentially stop multiple exploits. The raw exploits number is higher than what we reported in the post. We don't want to cause the confusion why #patch != #exploit, so we used the smaller number there. These vulns are all kernel specific. Userspace software running as root was not in scope of the analysis.