Dawid Golunski reported the nginx web server packages in Debian suffered from a privilege escalation vulnerability (www-data to root) due to the way log files are handled. This security update changes ownership of the /var/log/nginx directory root. In addition, /var/log/nginx has to be made accessible to local users, and local users may be able to read the log files themselves local until the next logrotate invocation.

For the stable distribution (jessie), this problem has been fixed in version 1.6.2-5+deb8u3.

We recommend that you upgrade your nginx packages.