Valerio Costamagna discovered that sudo did not properly validate the path for the ‘sudoedit’ pseudo-command when the PATH contained only a dot (‘.’). If secure_path and ignore_dot were disabled, a local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as root if sudo was configured to allow the attacker to use sudoedit. By default, secure_path is used and the sudoedit pseudo-command is not used in Ubuntu. This is a different but related issue to CVE-2010-0426.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
15 April 2010
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Valerio Costamagna discovered that sudo did not properly validate the path for the ‘sudoedit’ pseudo-command when the PATH contained only a dot (‘.’). If secure_path and ignore_dot were disabled, a local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as root if sudo was configured to allow the attacker to use sudoedit. By default, secure_path is used and the sudoedit pseudo-command is not used in Ubuntu. This is a different but related issue to CVE-2010-0426.
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.