Hendrik Weimer discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in awstats. By supplying the ‘configdir’ CGI parameter and setting it to an attacker-controlled directory (such as an FTP account, /tmp, or similar), an attacker could execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the web server (user ‘www-data’).
This update disables the ‘configdir’ parameter by default. If all local user accounts can be trusted, it can be reenabled by running awstats with the AWSTATS_ENABLE_CONFIG_DIR environment variable set to a nonempty value.
8 June 2006
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Hendrik Weimer discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in awstats. By supplying the ‘configdir’ CGI parameter and setting it to an attacker-controlled directory (such as an FTP account, /tmp, or similar), an attacker could execute arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the web server (user ‘www-data’).
This update disables the ‘configdir’ parameter by default. If all local user accounts can be trusted, it can be reenabled by running awstats with the AWSTATS_ENABLE_CONFIG_DIR environment variable set to a nonempty value.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.
Vulmon