I am not technical and my system gets hacked - trying to fix/upgrade

Question

After using command apt-get upgrade:

After this operation, 80.9 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
 syntax error: unknown group 'crontab' in statoverride file
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

after removing empathy and access prompt "for passwords and secrets" from the interface software updater not available on the sidebar or via search

Running 12.10.

Answer 1

Try to use statoverride-old file ,

sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride.bad
sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride-old /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade