14 DAY TRIAL // On November 27, Canonical published in a security notice details about Ruby vulnerabilities for its Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
According to the company, several security issues have been fixed in Ruby.
It has been discovered that Ruby incorrectly handled floating point number conversion. An attacker could have possibly used this issue, with an application that converts text to floating point numbers, to cause the application to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly to execute arbitrary code.
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can visit Canonical's security notification.
The security flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest ruby1.8, ruby1.9.1, libruby1.8, and libruby1.9.1 packages specific to each operating system. To apply the update, run the Update Manager application.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes. A system restart won't be necessary to implement them.