An updated automake package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Low 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. Automake is a tool for automatically generating Makefile.in files compliant with the GNU Coding Standards. It was found that the distcheck rule in Automake-generated Makefiles made a directory world-writable when preparing source archives. If a malicious, local user could access this directory, they could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running "make distcheck". Red Hat would like to thank Jim Meyering for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Stefano Lattarini as the original reporter. All automake users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains a backported patch to correct this issue.