14 DAY TRIAL // Details about quite a few Subversion vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have now been published by Canonical in a security notification.
A new major Subversion release was made available and the Ubuntu maintainers have pushed the new update into the repositories. It's an important version and upgrading the operating system is always a good idea.
"It was discovered that the Subversion mod_dav_svn module incorrectly handled requests requiring a lookup for a virtual transaction name that does not exist. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause the server to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04 LTS," 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 have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.
The problems can be repaired if you upgrade your system to the latest subversion, libapache2-svn, and libsvn1 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