Ronald Volgers discovered that the mount.cifs utility, when installed as a setuid program, suffered from a race condition when verifying user permissions. A local attacker could trick samba into mounting over arbitrary locations, leading to a root privilege escalation.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
28 January 2010
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Ronald Volgers discovered that the mount.cifs utility, when installed as a setuid program, suffered from a race condition when verifying user permissions. A local attacker could trick samba into mounting over arbitrary locations, leading to a root privilege escalation.
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 upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.