The ncompress package contains file compression and decompression utilities, which are compatible with the original UNIX compress utility (.Z file extensions).
Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team discovered a lack of bounds checking in ncompress. An attacker could create a carefully crafted file that could execute arbitrary code if uncompressed by a victim. (CVE-2006-1168)
In addition, two bugs that affected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 ncompress packages were fixed:
The display statistics and compression results in verbose mode were not shown when operating on zero length files.
An attempt to compress zero length files resulted in an unexpected return code.
Users of ncompress are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.