Apport could be made to run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.
Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that the crash file parser in Apport improperly treated the CrashDB field as python code. An attacker could use this to convince a user to open a maliciously crafted crash file and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of that user. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-9949)
14 December 2016
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Apport could be made to run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.
Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that the crash file parser in Apport improperly treated the CrashDB field as python code. An attacker could use this to convince a user to open a maliciously crafted crash file and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of that user. This issue only affected Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-9949)
Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that Apport did not properly sanitize the Package and SourcePackage fields in crash files before processing package specific hooks. An attacker could use this to convince a user to open a maliciously crafted crash file and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of that user. (CVE-2016-9950)
Donncha O Cearbhaill discovered that Apport would offer to restart an application based on the contents of the RespawnCommand or ProcCmdline fields in a crash file. An attacker could use this to convince a user to open a maliciously crafted crash file and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of that user. (CVE-2016-9951)
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.
Vulmon