14 DAY TRIAL // Details about Samba vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been published by Canonical in a security notice.
A large number of vulnerabilities were found in Samba (SMB/CIFS file, print, and login server for Unix). This is an important part of a Linux distribution and is especially useful if you want access to Windows systems.
"Thilo Uttendorfer discovered that the Samba LDAP server incorrectly handled certain packets. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause the LDAP server to stop responding, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 15.10," reads the security notice.
This is just one of the issues that have been identified and corrected with this particular update. For a more detailed description of the vulnerabilities, you can see Canonical's security notification. Users need to perform an update of their system as soon as possible.
The problems can be repaired if you upgrade your system to the latest samba package specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, users will have to run the Update Manager application. A reboot of the system is not needed since this is not a core component.
You can also upgrade the operating system by using the terminal. Enter these commands in a terminal near you (root is required):
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade