All of the Canonical-built distributions have been affected by the problem

Oct 18, 2013 18:01 GMT  ·  By

In a security notice Canonical published details about ICU vulnerabilities for its Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

According to Canonical, ICU could be made have been made to crash or to run programs as you login, if it processed specially crafted data.

For example, it has been discovered that ICU incorrectly handled memory operations. If an application using ICU processed crafted data, an attacker could have caused it to crash or to potentially execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program.

For a more detailed description of the security problems, you can visit Canonical's security notification.

The security flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the libicu48 package specific to each distribution. To apply the update, run the Update Manager application.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes. A system restart will not be necessary to implement them.