A new update has been made available for Ubuntu

Dec 22, 2014 18:49 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has announced that a number of NTP vulnerabilities have been corrected for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

NTP stands for Network Time Protocol daemon and utility programs and the devs identified a number of security issues that needed to be corrected.

"Stephen Roettger discovered that NTP contained buffer overflows in the crypto_recv(), ctl_putdata() and configure() functions. In non-default configurations, a remote attacker could use these issues to cause NTP to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. The default compiler options for affected releases should reduce the vulnerability to a denial of service. In addition, attackers would be isolated by the NTP AppArmor profile," reads the security advisory.

This is just one of the problems, for a more detailed description you can see Canonical's security notification. Users are advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible, especially since this is a complicated core component and it needs a lot of attention.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes. As you can imagine, it's mandatory to reboot the system.

You can also use the terminal to update the system. Just enter these commands in a terminal near you:

code
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

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