14 DAY TRIAL // Details about a Libav vulnerability in Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been published by Canonical in a security notice.
This latest update released by Canonical only covers a couple of supported systems and it looks like Ubuntu 14.04 LTS wasn't affected. This has to do with the Libav version being used.
According to the security notice, “It was discovered that Libav incorrectly handled certain malformed media files. If a user were tricked into opening a crafted media file, an attacker could cause a denial of service via application crash, or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program.”
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users should upgrade their Linux distribution as soon as possible to correct this problem.
The flaw can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the libavformat53 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.