With attacks in the wild reported, you need to fix this Linux bug as soon as possible.
Dirty Cow is a silly name, but it’s a serious Linux kernel problem. According to the Red Hatbug report, “a race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. An unprivileged local user could use this flaw to gain write access to otherwise read-only memory mappings and thus increase their privileges on the system.”
Race conditions themselves are common. Barely a month goes by that Windows, for example, doesn’t patch one. But common doesn’t mean innocuous.