14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Transmission vulnerability that has been fixed in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Linux distributions.
The Ubuntu developers have closed a small vulnerability with Transmission, the Bittorrent client used by default in the OS from Canonical, and users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.
According to the security notice, “Ben Hawkes discovered that Transmission incorrectly handled certain peer messages. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.”
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.
The flaw can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest transmission-common 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):
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade