Synopsis
The remote Ubuntu host is missing one or more security-related patches.
Description
It was discovered that virtio networking in the Linux kernel did not handle fragments correctly, leading to kernel memory corruption. A remote attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute code with administrative privileges.
(CVE-2015-5156)
Benjamin Randazzo discovered an information leak in the md (multiple device) driver when the bitmap_info.file is disabled. A local privileged attacker could use this to obtain sensitive information from the kernel. (CVE-2015-5697)
Marc-Andre Lureau discovered that the vhost driver did not properly release the userspace provided log file descriptor. A privileged attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (resource exhaustion). (CVE-2015-6252)
It was discovered that the Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) implementation in the Linux kernel did not verify sockets were properly bound before attempting to send a message, which could cause a NULL pointer dereference. An attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash). (CVE-2015-6937)
Ben Hutchings discovered that the Advanced Union Filesystem (aufs) for the Linux kernel did not correctly handle references of memory mapped files from an aufs mount. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code with administrative privileges. (CVE-2015-7312).
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 linux-image-3.16-generic, linux-image-3.16-generic-lpae and / or linux-image-3.16-lowlatency packages.