The normal installation of most distros enables the first user created to have sudo rights to everything, without ever having to log in as root or spread the root password.

Also: The best Linux distros for beginners With sudo in place, users no longer had to change to the root user or log in to that account to run administrative commands, such as installing software.

The bug allows users to bypass privilege restrictions to execute commands as root. A vulnerability in Sudo, a core command utility for Linux, could allow a user to execute commands as a root user ...