Red Hat has patched nine vulnerabilities in its Enterprise Linux 5 kernel that could cause denial of service and unauthorised system access if exploited by a malicious attacker the vendor announced on Monday.

The vendor claimed the update fixes three ‘important’ flaws; five ‘moderate’ flaws and one ‘low’ rated flaw in the Linux kernel which handles the basic functions of the operating system.

The Red Hat Security Response Team rated the update ‘important’ while security monitoring website Secunia rated the vulnerabilities as ‘moderately critical’.

Additionally, the open source vendor has fixed a ‘moderate’ security vulnerability in its OpenSSL packages available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and 3.

However, Secunia rated the vulnerability as ‘highly critical’ having the potential to cause DoS attacks on a vulnerable system, according to its advisory.

Furthermore, according to Red Hat the updates include several bug fixes preventing possible system crashes and data corruption.

Users are advised to upgrade to these packages.