I manage multi user systems and try to be on top of this and no, privilege escalation with a working public exploit are very rare. There’s quite a lot of CVEs with potential privilege excalation, but most of the time there is no real world exploit. And a large part of those are related to user namespaces in one way or another.

This one is truly scary, at least the immediate mitigation is pretty straightforward.

I had the same question, that was what prompted me to click on the source link. No it’s sales from the US only. I also realized, that even if it was that would mean that the increase in spending is even more dramatic.

The actual issue I realized today is that those are sales from the US government, not sure if Germany buying from an American company counts. So I’m not sure it can actually be compared. This does not improve my opinion of that article. Misrepresenting irrelevant data is not better than just misrepresenting data.

This article is trash trying to sell you something that is not true and actually disproved in the article itself :

According to U.S. government data, Berlin signed off on more than $17 billion in foreign military sales between 2020 and 2024, hitting a $13.9 billion record in 2023, highlighting increased demand following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

So what this paragraph is saying that in 2023 Germany spent 13.9 billions, and about 800 millions in average for the other four years (and that’s consistent with the linked source).

So the “drop” to 6.8 billions is actually five times the spending from 2024. And it’s double the average spending from the last five years. Germany buys more American hardware than ever (except 2023).