Serious Ubuntu Linux desktop bugs found and fixed
If you, like me, use Ubuntu desktop, or one of its relatives such as Linux Mint, you have a bug to patch.
Donncha O'Cearbhaill, an Irish security researcher, found a remote execution bug in Ubuntu. This security hole, which first appeared in Ubuntu 12.10, makes it possible for malicious code to be injected into your system when you open a booby-trapped file. This can be used to crash your system or run malware. It does not -- a small blessing -- enable attackers to become the root user.
O'Cearbhaill found that Ubuntu will open any unknown file with Apport if it begins with "ProblemType: ". Apport is Ubuntu's default crash handler and crash reporting program. So far, so good. Apport in turn generates a crash file with the unusual ".crash" extension and a magic byte sequence. Magic bytes are the unique sequences meant to identify a file. For example, a PDF document without a PDF extension can still be identified as PDF by its hexadecimal magic byte sequence: "25 50 44 46."
