Canonical released another update for the intel-microcode firmware for all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems to address recent Intel MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) security vulnerabilities.

Last month on May 14th, Intel published details about four new security vulnerabilities affecting several of its Intel microprocessor families. The company released updated microcode firmware to mitigate these hardware flaws, which quickly landed in the software repositories of all supported Ubuntu releases, but only some of the processor families were supported.

Last week, intel-microcode firmware updates arrived in Ubuntu's repositories to mitigate these new security vulnerabilities on systems using Intel Cherry Trail and Intel Bay Trail processor families, and now Canonical released another update to fix the hardware flaws on the Intel Sandy Bridge processor family, for all supported Ubuntu releases.

"USN-3977-1 and USN-3977-2 provided mitigations for Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities in Intel Microcode for a large number of Intel processor families. This update provides the corresponding updated microcode mitigations for the Intel Sandy Bridge processor family," reads the new security advisory.

How to protect your Ubuntu computers agains the Intel MDS vulnerabilities

If you're using Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo), Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), or Ubuntu 14.04 ESM (Trusty Tahr) on a computer running one of the affected Intel CPUs, you should update the intel-microcode firmware right now to version 3.20190618.0, which you can download from the official software repositories.

The new intel-microcode versions available are 3.20190618.0ubuntu0.19.04.1 for Ubuntu 19.04, 3.20190618.0ubuntu0.18.10.1 for Ubuntu 18.10, 3.20190618.0ubuntu0.18.04.1 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 3.20190618.0ubuntu0.16.04.1 for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and 3.20190618.0ubuntu0.14.04.1 for Ubuntu 14.04 ESM.

To update your system, follow the instructions provided by Canonical at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades. Also, make sure you also have the latest Linux kernel for your Ubuntu Linux release installed to fully mitigate these new security vulnerabilities.