All users are urged to update as soon as possible

May 6, 2015 05:42 GMT  ·  By

The first kernel update for the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system arrived on May 5 and it patched a very important vulnerability in the upstream Linux kernel 3.19. As such, all Ubuntu 15.04 users are urged to update their systems as soon as possible.

It was recently discovered that a local attacker could gain administrative privileges by exploiting a race condition between chown() and execve() in the Linux kernel. This could be achieved easily by using chown on a setuid-user-binary. The vulnerability has a high priority, which means that all Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) users must update immediately.

"The system could be made to run programs as an administrator," says Canonical in the security notice. "The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions. After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make all the necessary changes."

As reported by Softpedia earlier today, the CVE-2015-3339 kernel vulnerability affects all supported Ubuntu operating systems, including Ubuntu 14.10, 14.04 LTS, and 12.04 LTS. Once again, we urge all Ubuntu users to update their systems immediately in order to patch the kernel vulnerability.