14 DAY TRIAL // In a security notice, Canonical published details about a libXfont vulnerability in its Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
According to the company, libXfont could have been made to crash or run programs as an administrator, if it opened a specially crafted font file.
It has been discovered that libXfont incorrectly handled certain malformed BDF fonts. An attacker could use a specially crafted font file to cause libXfont to crash, or possibly execute arbitrary code in order to gain privileges. The default compiler options for affected releases should reduce the vulnerability to a denial of service.
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification.
The security flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest libxfont1 package specific to each distribution. To apply the update, run the Update Manager application.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes, but this time a system restart will be necessary to implement them.