McAfee VirusScan vulnerability found, patched
Multibyte character overflow issue breaches on-access defences.
A vulnerability has been reported in the on-access component of McAfee's flagship VirusScan product, which could be used to disable on-access protection and potentially to execute malicious code on a vulnerable system.
The flaw involves a buffer overflow while processing files with exceptionally long filenames which include multibyte characters, commonly used for the representation of East Asian languages. Any attempt by the on-access scanner to check such maliciously-crafter files could cause the overflow and render the scanner inactive, leaving the system open to attack.
The problem was reported to McAfee by researchers at iDefense in early February, and is now being made public following the release of patches by McAfee. The vulnerability is thought to affect products up to version 8.0i patch 11, and users are advised to ensure the most recent patches are applied as soon as possible.
An advisory from iDefense is here, with more information from McAfee here and a Secunia alert here.
19 April 2007
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