Marcus Meissner discovered a race condition in gdm’s handling of the ~/.ICEauthority file permissions. A local attacker could exploit this to become the owner of an arbitrary file in the system. When getting control over automatically executed scripts (like cron jobs), the attacker could eventually leverage this flaw to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
4 May 2006
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Marcus Meissner discovered a race condition in gdm’s handling of the ~/.ICEauthority file permissions. A local attacker could exploit this to become the owner of an arbitrary file in the system. When getting control over automatically executed scripts (like cron jobs), the attacker could eventually leverage this flaw to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
Vulmon