The owners of iOS device and Sony Playstation 3 when looking for ways to jailbreak their devices might be familiar with the name George Hotz. He is also known as XDA Recognized Developer, Geohot, a New Jersey based hacker who became popular for his work in jailbreaking and hacking the above mentioned devices.

This time, Geohot recently released his own root tool on XDA developers that would work on almost all the Android handsets, including the Verizon and AT&T Galaxy S5 versions which till now was hard to break.

The root tool has been named Towelroot that exploits the Linux Kernel build that's older than June 3 - Galaxy S4 Active, the Nexus 5 and AT&T and Verizon variants of the Galaxy Note 3.

Geohot has apparently exploited a vulnerability that builds around Linux Kernel CVE-2014-3153, which was recently discovered by hacker Pinkie Pie, and it involves an issue in the Futex subsystem that in turn allows for privilege escalation. Though it was released exclusively for the Verizon Galaxy S5, the root exploit will rationally be compatible with almost every device with an unpatched kernel, that is, at this point of time nearly every device which does not run a recent build of a custom ROM with a patched kernel.

The owner of a Verizon Galaxy S5 or any other previously unrooted device, if would like to get on the root action, initially they should reach over to the original thread and try out the towelroot. While rooting the device, there is some background music available in the Geohot's SoundCloud to listen to a song released 10 days before advertising Towelroot.

Surprisingly, many Verizon and AT&T Galaxy S5 users were waiting for a tool to root these handsets, with a root bounty having topped $18,000 in late May. With the announcement of Geohot's Towelroot, a lot of interest on XDA developers has been generated and the forum thread has crossed over 135 pages since its release.