Once again, Canonical has updated Ubuntu kernel and all its official flavors and once again it has done it to solve security problems. In other ocasionsThe company that runs Mark Shuttleworth has fixed so many bugs that we have treated the update as "urgent", but this time there have been fewer vulnerabilities fixed and none of them are serious enough to worry too much; none are of high urgency or critical.
The Affected systems are all those that enjoy official support, which right now are Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine, Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver and Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. At the time of writing this article, no information has been published about Ubuntu 14.04, currently in the ESM phase, nor Ubuntu 20.04, the version currently in development that will be officially launched on April 23. Ubuntu 12.04 is no longer supported (not even in ESM) and Ubuntu 19.04 reached the end of its life cycle last Thursday.
The Ubuntu 16.04 kernel is the most affected, with 9 vulnerabilities
The reports that tell us about the security bugs fixed are the USN-4253-1, which tells us about a vulnerability in Eoan Ermine, the USN-4255-1, which tells us about two vulnerabilities in Bionic Beaver, and the USN-4254-1, which does the same but about 9 Xenial Xerus vulnerabilities. All the bugs of 19.10 and 18.04 are of medium urgency, while in 16.04 2 of medium urgency have been corrected and the rest are of low or negligible priority. The bugs could be used to expose sensitive information, but local access to the equipment was needed.
As on other occasions, Canonical only publishes the security reports once the patches have been released, so protecting ourselves from all these bugs is as simple as opening our software center (or Software Update app) and update the packages that will already be waiting for us. For the changes to take effect, the operating system will need to be restarted.