Four New Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in All Supported Ubuntu OSes, Update Now

On the last day of November 2016, Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, published a bunch of new security advisories to inform the community about the availability of new kernel versions for its supported OSes.

The company pushed patched variants of the kernel packages in Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) to the stable software repositories, addressing a total of four vulnerabilities discovered recently by various hackers and security researchers.

The most common security flaw, CVE-2016-7425, was discovered by Marco Grassi in Linux kernel's Areca RAID Controllers driver, which was not capable of properly validating control messages, thus allowing a local attacker to crash the system or gain administrative privileges. The issue affects Ubuntu 16.10, 16.04 LTS, 1...