Canonical published details about a number of Thunderbird vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems, which means that a new version is now available.
The Thunderbird email client has been updated by its developers and now the latest version has finally landed in the Ubuntu repos, along with all the improvements and fixes.
For example, “CChristian Holler and Patrick McManus discovered multiple memory safety issues in Thunderbird. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted message with scripting enabled, an attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service via application crash, or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking Thunderbird. ” reads the announcement.
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification.
The flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest Thunderbird package specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, run the Update Manager application. You can also upgrade your system from the terminal. Just enter these two commands (you will need to be root for this to work):
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade