14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical reveals that a few Tomcat vulnerabilities have been found and corrected in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
The Tomcat security issues have been fixed in all the support Ubuntu systems and users need to update their systems in order to close the exploits.
“David Jorm discovered that Tomcat incorrectly handled certain requests, submitted using chunked transfer encoding. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause the Tomcat server to consume resources, resulting in a denial of service,” reads the security notice.
Also, “An out-of-bounds read was discovered in Chromium. If a user were tricked in to opening a specially crafter website, an attacker could potentially exploit this to cause a denial of service via application crash.”
These are just a couple of the vulnerabilities, and for a more detailed description of the problems you can see Canonical's security notification. Users are advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.
The flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest libtomcat7-java and libtomcat6-java packages specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, run the Update Manager application.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes and users won't have to restart the PC or laptop in order to apply the patch.