GNU tar 1.16 and 1.15.1, and possibly other versions, allows user-assisted attackers to overwrite arbitrary files via a tar file that contains a GNUTYPE_NAMES record with a symbolic link, which is not properly handled by the extract_archive function in extract.c and extract_mangle function in mangle.c, a variant of CVE-2002-1216.

GNU tar 1.13.19 and other versions before 1.13.25 allows remote attackers to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack, as the result of a modification that effectively disabled the security check.