Users will have to restart the system after the update

Sep 27, 2013 18:01 GMT  ·  By

A security vulnerability that was discovered in the Linux kernel, affecting the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system, has been announced by Canonical.

According to Canonical, the system could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.

A failure to validate block numbers has been discovered in the Linux kernel's implementation of the XFS filesystem. A local user could have caused a denial of service (system crash) if they had mounted, or caused to be mounted a corrupted or special crafted XFS file system.

The security flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the linux-image-3.2.0-54-generic (3.2.0-54.82).

Don't forget to reboot your computer after the upgrade!

ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change, the kernel packages have a new version number, which will force you to reinstall and recompile all third-party kernel modules you might have installed. Moreover, if you use the linux-restricted-modules package, you have to update it as well to get modules that work with the new Linux kernel version.