Friday, September 25, 2009
Examine Your Avast! Home/Proffesional Antivirus Software
If you think that antivirus software is unsusceptible to various security issues, you should change your mindset and think again. Sadly, a big number of different antivirus software, as well as a series of other software programs are often affected by distinct vulnerabilities. Which antivirus software is protecting your computer at the moment?
If Avast! antivirus is your answer, then you should stop for a moment and get to know about a specific flaw that has been identified in this particular software product. More specifically, the vulnerability was discovered in avast! Home/Professional. Bad intentioned users could exploit this vulnerability with the aim to cause a denial of service condition or obtain increased rights.
Surely, you must be interested in reasons for this type of vulnerability. This security issue is a result of a boundary error in the "aswMon2" kernel driver while dealing with IOCTLs. This can be exploited to create a stack-based buffer overflow attack, through a malicious 0xB2C80018 IOCTL.
The vulnerability was confirmed in avast! Professional version 4.8.1351. Users should note that other versions might be vulnerable as well. So, what is the ultimate impact of the exploitation of this vulnerability? If successfully exploited by vicious users, they could execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM rights.
Avast! antivirus is an antivirus program, which is based on a central scanning engine and includes anti-spyware technology, as well as anti-rootkit and self-protection capabilities. Avast! Home Edition is the freeware version of Avast! antivirus available to Microsoft Windows (2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003/2008) and Linux users. Some files pertaining to Windows 2000 include: netmon.exe, xcommand.dll, inetwh16.dll and aciniupd.exe. Avast! Professional Edition is for businesses and users that need additional features. Getting back to the actual vulnerability in Avast! antivirus, one solution to this problem would be to block local access and limit it to trusted users only.
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Source Google News
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