Apache Tomcat is a servlet container for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. A flaw was found in the way the tomcat5 init script handled the catalina.out log file. A malicious web application deployed on Tomcat could use this flaw to perform a symbolic link attack to change the ownership of an arbitrary system file to that of the tomcat user, allowing them to escalate their privileges to root. Note: With this update, /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out has been moved to the /var/log/tomcat5-initd.log file. Red Hat would like to thank Simon Fayer of Imperial College London for reporting this issue. Users of Tomcat are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which correct this issue. Tomcat must be restarted for this update to take effect.