14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has announced that a couple of Net-SNMP vulnerabilities were found and fixed for Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
net-snmp - SNMP is short for Simple Network Management Protocol server and applications, and developers found that it could have been made to crash or run programs if it received specially crafted network traffic.
"It was discovered that Net-SNMP incorrectly handled certain trap messages when the -OQ option was used. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause Net-SNMP to crash, resulting in a denial of service. Also, Qinghao Tang discovered that Net-SNMP incorrectly handled SNMP PDU parsing failures. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause Net-SNMP to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code," reads the security advisory.
These are the two issues identified, and 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, you won’t need to reboot the system. You can also use the terminal to update the system. Just enter these commands in a terminal near you:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade