14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has published details in a security notice about a Samba vulnerability that has been corrected in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
The Ubuntu developers have said that Samba could have been made to run programs as an administrator, if it received specially crafted network traffic.
According to the security notice, “Volker Lendecke discovered that the Samba NetBIOS name service daemon incorrectly handled certain memory operations. A remote attacker could use this issue to execute arbitrary code as the root user.”
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, even if it might not seem like an important problem.
The flaw can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest Samba package 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. You won't have to restart the PC in order to complete the procedure.