All users are urged to update as soon as possible

May 21, 2015 03:58 GMT  ·  By

After having announced new kernel updates for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) operating systems, Canonical has also published details about a new kernel update for its oldest LTS release, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

The vanilla version of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system is using Linux kernel 3.2, and according to the information provided by Canonical, a security issue affected the Precise Pangolin release and all of its derivatives.

A Linux kernel integer overflow has been discovered by Vincent Tondellier in the Netfilter connection tracking accounting of loaded extensions, which could allow an attacker on the LAN (Local Area Network) to crash the targeted system by causing a denial of service (DoS) attack.

"A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives," says Canonical in the Ubuntu Security Notice for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on May 20. "The system could be made to crash if it received specially crafted network traffic."

As usual, the issue mentioned above can be easily patched by updating your Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system(s) to the linux-image-3.2.0-84 (3.2.0-84.121) packages. Canonical urges all users to update their Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installations as soon as possible. The new kernel packages are already in the repositories.

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