Synopsis
The remote Ubuntu host is missing one or more security-related patches.
Description
Mike Frysinger discovered that the file awk script detector used multiple wildcard with unlimited repetitions. An attacker could use this issue to cause file to consume resources, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2013-7345)
Francisco Alonso discovered that file incorrectly handled certain CDF documents. A attacker could use this issue to cause file to hang or crash, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2014-0207, CVE-2014-3478, CVE-2014-3479, CVE-2014-3480, CVE-2014-3487)
Jan Kaluza discovered that file did not properly restrict the amount of data read during regex searches. An attacker could use this issue to cause file to consume resources, resulting in a denial of service.
(CVE-2014-3538).
Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.
Solution
Update the affected file and / or libmagic1 packages.