14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical published details about the Pidgin vulnerabilities in its Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
According to the company, several security issues have been fixed in Pidgin.
For example, it has been discovered that Pidgin incorrectly handled the Yahoo! protocol. A remote attacker could use this issue to cause Pidgin to crash, resulting in a denial of service.
Also, Pidgin incorrectly handled certain HTTP responses. A malicious remote server or a man in the middle could use this issue to cause Pidgin to crash.
For a more detailed description of the problems, you can see Canonical's security notification.
The flaws can be fixed if you upgrade your system(s) to the latest pidgin and libpurple0 packages specific to each distribution. To apply the patch, run the Update Manager application.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes and you will have to restart the system.