The system could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.
Andy Lutomirski discovered a flaw with the Linux kernel’s ptrace syscall on x86_64 processors. An attacker could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (System Crash) or potential gain administrative privileges.
5 July 2014
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
The system could be made to crash or run programs as an administrator.
Andy Lutomirski discovered a flaw with the Linux kernel’s ptrace syscall on x86_64 processors. An attacker could exploit this flaw to cause a denial of service (System Crash) or potential gain administrative 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.
After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make all the necessary changes.
ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which requires you to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules you might have installed. If you use linux-restricted-modules, you have to update that package as well to get modules which work with the new kernel version. Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic, linux-server, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform this as well.