remote privilege escalation in webalizer

The webalizer is a widely used tool for analyzing web server logs and produce statistics in HTML format. An exploitable bug was found in webalizer which allows a remote attacker to execute commands on other client machines or revealing sensitive information by placing HTML tags in the right place. This is possible due to missing sanity checks on untrusted data - hostnames and search keywords in this case - that are received by webalizer. This kind of attack is also known as “Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability”. Additionally the untrusted data will be written to files on the server running webalizer; this may lead to further problems when using this data as input for third-party software/scripts.