All the supported Ubuntu OSes have been affected by this issue

Jun 18, 2014 14:28 GMT  ·  By

Details about an APT vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems have been published by Canonical in a security notice.

Ubuntu developers have closed an APT vulnerability, which doesn't happen all that often. This is not a major issue and users shouldn't be too worried.

According to the security notice, “Jakub Wilk discovered that APT did not correctly validate signatures when downloading source packages. If a remote attacker were able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack, this flaw could potentially be used to install altered source packages.”

For a more detailed description of the vulnerability, 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 APT specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, you 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 update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes and you won’t have to restart the computer or any application.