The GNU tar program saves many files together in one archive and can restore individual files (or all of the files) from that archive.
Teemu Salmela discovered a path traversal flaw in the way GNU tar extracted archives. A malicious user could create a tar archive that could write to arbitrary files to which the user running GNU tar has write access. (CVE-2006-6097)
Users of tar should upgrade to this updated package, which contains a replacement backported patch to correct this issue.