14 DAY TRIAL // A libwmf vulnerability has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
libwmf is a library that deals with Windows metafile conversion, so it's not exactly high up on the list of core apps for a Linux distribution. On the other hand, this is a vulnerability nonetheless and needs to be corrected as soon as possible.
"Fernando Muñoz and Stefan Cornelius discovered that libwmf incorrectly handled certain malformed images. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a crafted image file, an attacker could cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with privileges of the user invoking the program," said the maintainers in the security notification.
For a more detailed description of the issues, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users should upgrade their Linux distribution in order to correct this issue. The vulnerability can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest libwmf0.2-7 package specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, users 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):
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade