Updated tomcat5 packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section. 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.