Users have been advised to upgrade as soon as possible

Jan 23, 2015 16:01 GMT  ·  By

In a recent security notice, Canonical has published details about a Samba exploit that has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.

The Ubuntu devs have explained that a security issue has been fixed in Samba, meaning that a new version of the application needed to be pushed to the repositories. It only affected Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The previous Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has a different branch.

"Andrew Bartlett discovered that Samba incorrectly handled delegation of authority when being used as an Active Directory Domain Controller. An attacker given delegation privileges could use this issue to escalate their privileges further," reads the security notification.

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. It's not a major issue, but a system upgrade never hurt anyone.

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):

code
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
A standard system update will make all the necessary changes and is not imperative to restart the computer.