Users have been advised to upgrade as soon as possible

Aug 11, 2014 18:01 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Libav vulnerability in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) that has been found and fixed.

This Libav exploit is not something to worry regular users, but a system update is recommended to close this vulnerability.

According to the security notice, “It was discovered that Libav incorrectly handled certain malformed media files. If a user were tricked into opening a crafted media file, an attacker could cause a denial of service via application crash, or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program.”

For a more detailed description of the problem, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users should upgrade their Linux distribution in order to correct this issue.

The flaw can be fixed if you upgrade your system to the latest libavformat53 and libavcodec53 packages specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, users can simply run the Update Manager application.

If you don't want to use the Software Updater, you can open a terminal and enter the following commands (you will need to be root):

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes. Unlike regular updates, the developers actually used an upstream version to correct all the issues.