Two vulnerabilities have been reported in AWStats, where one has an unknown impact and the other can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

1) Input passed to the "configdir" parameter is not sanitised before being used as an argument to the "open()" Perl routine. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the web server by passing these as input together with certain shell meta-characters.

The "pluginmode", "loadplugin", and "noloadplugin" parameters are reportedly also affected.

Successful exploitation requires that the application is running as a CGI script.

2) The vendor has reported an unknown security hole. No more information is available.

Solution
Update to version 6.3.
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Discovered by anonymous person and reported via iDEFENSE.
2) Reported by vendor.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
AWStats:
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_changelog.txt

iDEFENSE:
http://www.idefense.com/application/poi/display?id=185&type=vulnerabilities

Gentoo:
http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/glsa-200501-36.xml

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers