A recently discovered security issue affects both the nvidia-graphics-drivers-304 and nvidia-graphics-drivers-340 proprietary graphics drivers available on the official repos of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems.
According to a recent security notice published by Canonical, it would appear that the Nvidia graphics drivers could be made to crash by a local attacker, under certain conditions, due to a flaw in the kernel mode layer. The attacker could exploit the security vulnerability to cause a denial of service (DoS) attack.
The issue has been documented as CVE-2016-8826 because it affects other Linux-based operating systems. It also affects all the officially recognized flavors of Ubuntu, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Edubuntu, and others from the respective branches mentioned above.
To fix the problem, Canonical urges all users of these Ubuntu releases and its derivatives to update the Nvidia Legacy 304 and 340 graphics drivers to version 340.101 and 304.134. These are already available in the stable repositories of all supported Ubuntu operating systems.
Source: http://linux.softpedia.com/blog/canonical-patches-nvidia-graphics-drivers-vulnerability-in-all-ubuntu-releases-512016.shtml
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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