Details about a couple of ICU vulnerabilities that have been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been published by Canonical.
ICU stands for International Components for Unicode library, and you can probably already imagine a number of problems with a security hole in this area. Fortunately, this is not a big deal, but users should really take the time to update their systems.
“It was discovered that ICU incorrectly handled certain memory operations when processing data. If an application using ICU processed crafted data, a remote attacker could possibly cause it to crash or potentially execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program,” reads the security notice.
This is just one of the issues that have been found and corrected with this update. For a more detailed description of the problems, 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 patch 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 required. You can also use the terminal and enter these commands (root is needed for this procedure to work):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
This is a small package and it should arrive fairly quickly. Stay safe!
Via Softpedia