14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has announced that a few NTP vulnerabilities were found and corrected for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
NTP is short for Network Time Protocol daemon, and its developers identified a number of problems that needed to be corrected. A patch has been issued, and Ubuntu maintainers have been quick to integrate it.
"Juergen Perlinger discovered that NTP incorrectly generated MD5 keys on big-endian platforms. This issue could either cause NTP-keygen to hang, or could result in non-random keys. Also, Miroslav Lichvar discovered that NTP incorrectly handled certain invalid packets. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause a denial of service" reads the security advisory.
These are just a couple of the issues, so 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