date and touch could be made to crash or run programs if they handled specially crafted input.
It was discovered that the distcheck rule in dist-check.mk in GNU coreutils allows local users to gain privileges via a symlink attack on a directory tree under /tmp. This issue only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (CVE-2009-4135)
14 January 2015
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
date and touch could be made to crash or run programs if they handled specially crafted input.
It was discovered that the distcheck rule in dist-check.mk in GNU coreutils allows local users to gain privileges via a symlink attack on a directory tree under /tmp. This issue only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (CVE-2009-4135)
Bertrand Jacquin and Fiedler Roman discovered date and touch incorrectly handled user-supplied input. An attacker could possibly use this to cause a denial of service or potentially execute code. (CVE-2014-9471)
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.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.