HD Moore of Rapid7 discovered a symlink attack in Wget, a command-line
utility to retrieve files via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. The vulnerability
allows to create arbitrary files on the user’s system when Wget runs in
recursive mode against a malicious FTP server. Arbitrary file creation
may override content of user’s files or permit remote code execution with
the user privilege.

This update changes the default setting in Wget such that it no longer
creates local symbolic links, but rather traverses them and retrieves the
pointed-to file in such a retrieval.

For Debian 6 Squeeze, these issues have been fixed in wget version 1.12-2.1+deb6u1