Thunderbird could be made to run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.
Paul Nickerson, Jesse Ruderman, Olli Pettay, Igor Bukanov, Josh Soref, Gary Kwong, Martijn Wargers, Siddharth Agarwal and Michal Zalewski discovered various flaws in the browser engine. An attacker could exploit this to crash Thunderbird or possibly run arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2010-3175, CVE-2010-3176)
20 October 2010
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Thunderbird could be made to run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted file.
Paul Nickerson, Jesse Ruderman, Olli Pettay, Igor Bukanov, Josh Soref, Gary Kwong, Martijn Wargers, Siddharth Agarwal and Michal Zalewski discovered various flaws in the browser engine. An attacker could exploit this to crash Thunderbird or possibly run arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2010-3175, CVE-2010-3176)
Alexander Miller, Sergey Glazunov, and others discovered several flaws in the JavaScript engine. If JavaScript were enabled, an attacker could exploit this to crash Thunderbird or possibly run arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2010-3179, CVE-2010-3180, CVE-2010-3183)
Eduardo Vela Nava discovered that Thunderbird could be made to violate the same-origin policy by using modal calls with JavaScript. If JavaScript were enabled, an attacker could exploit this to steal information from another site. (CVE-2010-3178)
Dmitri GribenkoDmitri Gribenko discovered that Thunderbird did not properly setup the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. A local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2010-3182)
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 restart Thunderbird to make all the necessary changes.
Vulmon