Users will have to update their systems as soon as possible

Sep 28, 2014 18:07 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has patched a number of Bash vulnerabilities in their Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

As you might have heard, a new major vulnerability has been identified for Unix systems, this time for Bash. OpenSSL is off the hook, as it seems that the new Bash exploit, called Shellshock, is actually much worse. In any case, most of the Linux distros devs have already patched their systems against this issue.

"Florian Weimer and Todd Sabin discovered that the Bash parser incorrectly handled memory. An attacker could possibly use this issue to bypass certain environment restrictions and execute arbitrary code. In addition, this update introduces a hardening measure which adds prefixes and suffixes around environment variable names which contain shell functions," say the Ubuntu developers in the security notice.

In order to fix the issues on the aforementioned systems, users have to perform a regular upgrade and the new packages will be installed automatically. The normal update process should be enough and users won't have to restart their systems.

With this mind, it's likely that more Bash patches will arrive in the days to come, so make sure that you keep your system updated, no matter who made it.