14 DAY TRIAL // A single GParted vulnerability has been found and corrected in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). The developers have issued a patch and the GParted app has been updated.
The patch for Gparted has been issued only for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and the issue only affected this specific platform. From what the developers are saying, GParted could have been made to run programs as an administrator, which could generate some serious situations.
"Wolfgang Ettlinger discovered that GParted incorrectly filtered shell metacharacters when running external commands. A local attacker could use this issue with a crafted filesystem label to run arbitrary commands as the administrator," is noted in the announcement.
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible, which will also bring the update for the application, if it's already installed.
It's possible to update the operating system from a terminal and you will have to be root in order to do it. You only need to enter the following commands in a terminal:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade