The security research Dawid Golunski reported a Root Privilege Escalation in the Apache Tomcat (RedHat-based distros) tracked as CVE-2016-5425. The issue could be triggered by a malicious web application deployed on Tomcat in order to trigger the issue and escalate their privileges to root. Attackers could very easily exploit the weak permissions on tomcat to inject configuration that creates a rootshell or remote reverse shell that allows them to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges.”]
Source: https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/52156/hacking/cve-2016-5425-apache-tomcat.html