The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 2.6.8.1-16.5. You need to reboot the computer after doing a standard system upgrade to effect the necessary changes.
Details follow:
Georgi Guninski discovered two Denial of Service vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.
An integer overflow in the vc_resize() function caused the memory allocation for the new screen being too short, thus causing a buffer overflow and a kernel crash.
There was also a memory leak in the ip_options_get() function. Calling ip_cmsg_send() very often would gradually exhaust memory.
Note: The original advisory (see URL above) also mentions a "ip_options_get integer overflow". This was already fixed in USN-38-1 (known as CAN-2004-1016).