A couple of other Ubuntu systems have been affected by this issue

Jul 18, 2014 14:46 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has published details in a security notice about a MiniUPnPc exploit that has been corrected in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

The Ubuntu developers explain that a problem with MiniUPnPc, which could have been made to crash, is now solved and users are advised to update as soon as possible.

According to the security notice, “It was discovered that MiniUPnPc incorrectly handled certain buffer lengths. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause applications using MiniUPnPc to crash, resulting in a denial of service.”

For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users should upgrade their Linux distribution in order to correct this issue. This is not a major vulnerability, but it needed to be closed nonetheless.

The flaw can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest libminiupnpc8 package 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):

code
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes. You will have to restart the PC in order to complete the procedure.