It was discovered that gzip incorrectly handled certain malformed compressed files. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a specially crafted gzip file, an attacker could cause gzip to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program. Aki Helin discovered that gzip incorrectly handled certain malformed files compressed with the Lempel–Ziv–Welch algorithm. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a specially crafted gzip file, an attacker could cause gzip to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking the program