Thank you for reading the Linux Advisory Watch Security Newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers with a quick summary of each week's vendor security bulletins and pointers on methods to improve the security posture of your open source system. Vulnerabilities affect nearly every vendor virtually every week, so be sure to read through to find the updates your distributor have made available.

LinuxSecurity.com Feature Extras:

Password guessing with Medusa 2.0 - Medusa was created by the fine folks at foofus.net, in fact the much awaited Medusa 2.0 update was released in February of 2010. For a complete change log please visit

Password guessing as an attack vector - Using password guessing as an attack vector. Over the years we've been taught a strong password must be long and complex to be considered secure. Some of us have taken that notion to heart and always ensure our passwords are strong. But some don't give a second thought to the complexity or length of our password.

(May 3)

The initial update introduced a regression, which could lead to errors when processing some JPEG files. For the stable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in [More...]
(May 3)

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in Icedove, an unbranded version of the Thunderbird mail/news client. CVE-2012-0467 [More...]
(May 2)

Ivano Cristofolini discovered that insufficient security checks in Samba's handling of LSA RPC calls could lead to privilege escalation by gaining the "take ownership" privilege. [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:070: samba (May 4)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in samba: A file existence dislosure flaw was found in the way mount.cifs tool of the Samba SMB/CIFS tools suite performed mount of a Linux CIFS (Common Internet File System) filesystem. A local user, able to [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:069: cifs-utils (May 4)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in cifs-utils: A file existence dislosure flaw was found in the way mount.cifs tool of the Samba SMB/CIFS tools suite performed mount of a Linux CIFS (Common Internet File System) filesystem. A local user, able to [More...]
Mandriva: 2012:067: samba (May 1)

A vulnerability has been found and corrected in samba: Security checks were incorrectly applied to the Local Security Authority (LSA) remote proceedure calls (RPC) CreateAccount, OpenAccount, AddAccountRights and RemoveAccountRights allowing any [More...]
Ubuntu: 1430-3: Thunderbird vulnerabilities (May 4)

Several security issues were fixed in Thunderbird.
Ubuntu: 1438-1: Nova vulnerability (May 3)

Nova could be made to crash the system under certain conditions.
Ubuntu: 1435-1: ImageMagick vulnerabilities (May 1)

ImageMagick could be made to crash or run programs as your login if itopened a specially crafted file.
Ubuntu: 1433-1: Linux kernel (Oneiric backport) vulnerabilities (May 1)

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.
Ubuntu: 1431-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities (Apr 30)

Several security issues were fixed in the kernel.