Federico Muttis discovered that libpurple, the shared library that adds support for various instant messaging networks to the pidgin IM client, is vulnerable to a heap-based buffer overflow. This issue exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2008-2927 and CVE-2009-1376. An attacker can exploit this by sending two consecutive SLP packets to a victim via MSN.
The first packet is used to create an SLP message object with an offset of zero, the second packet then contains a crafted offset which hits the vulnerable code originally fixed in CVE-2008-2927 and CVE-2009-1376 and allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
Note: Users with the "Allow only the users below" setting are not vulnerable to this attack. If you can't install the below updates you may want to set this via Tools->Privacy.
For the stable distribution (lenny), this problem has been fixed in version 2.4.3-4lenny3.
For the testing distribution (squeeze), this problem will be fixed soon.
For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 2.5.9-1.
We recommend that you upgrade your pidgin packages.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.