Secunia

Description

Red Hat has issued an update for wget. This fixes a vulnerability, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to perform certain actions on a vulnerable system with escalated privileges.

The vulnerability is caused due to a race condition when creating files that are downloaded using wget. The problem is that there is a time gap between the check is made to determine whether a local file exists and the time that the file is created. This can be exploited via symlink attacks to overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the user running the vulnerable program.

Successful exploitation requires write permissions to the directory, which wget creates the downloaded file in.

Note: A bug in the handling of hostnames containing the ".." characters, and another in the handling of server replies containing terminal escape sequences, have also been fixed.

Solution
Updated packages are available from Red Hat Network.
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-771.html

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area