The distribution reached end-of-life on July 23

Jul 24, 2015 20:20 GMT  ·  By

On July 23, we reported that the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) operating system reached end-of-life and that Canonical urges all users that still run the Utopic distribution to upgrade to the current stable release, Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), as soon as possible.

EOL (End-of-Life) for a Linux kernel-based operating system means that it will no longer receive software updates or security patches. Therefore, Canonical said that it will stop feeding the Ubuntu 14.10 Linux distribution and its derivatives with security updates and select high-impact bug fixes.

However, on July 24, Canonical published details about one last kernel update for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) users who didn't manage to upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) quite yet, most probably in order to keep them safe for awhile until they upgrade their installation.

The kernel update patches three security issues, two of them being flaws discovered in the Linux kernel's handling of invalid UDP checksums, which could allow local attackers to flood the host system with UDP packets that have invalid checksums, or cause a denial of service against apps that use epoll by injecting a single UDP packet that has an invalid checksum.

Ubuntu 14.10 must update their system immediately or upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04

The third flaw was discovered in the kvm_apic_has_events function of Linux kernel's KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) subsystem, and it could allow a local, unprivileged user to crash the host system by causing a denial of service.

All users who are still using the Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) distribution are urged to update their system to linux-image-3.16.0-44 (3.16.0-44.59) immediately in order to patch the security flaws mentioned above. However, we strongly recommend that you make a backup of your important files and upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 now.