Fighting malware and spam

Vulnerabilities strike more AV firms, and Mac too

F-Secure and Authentium patch holes, while Samba flaws worry Apple users.

Users of Mac OS X, used to a cosy sense of security, have been warned of possible penetration vectors thanks to a slew of flaws unveiled in the Samba networking system used to connect Macs to Windows systems.

An alert issued by Symantec's DeepSight threat team warned Mac users that even if their systems report being fully patched, fixes for the latest batch of vulnerabilities in Samba, reported in early May, are unlikely to be in place, as Apple has apparently not released updates to the system since 2005. While a default installation of Mac OS X includes Samba version 3.0.10, version 3.0.25 is needed to be safe from the latest flaws.

Details of the Samba buffer-overflow issues are here, and patches can be downloaded here.

F-Secure meanwhile joins a growing roster of AV firms rocked by security flaws in their products in recent months, with four separate vulnerabilities in their products reported in the last few days. The most serious is a buffer overflow while scanning LHA archives, which can result in remote system access - a summary from F-Secure is here, and details from Secunia are here.

Less severe are a denial of service attack involving archives and packed files which can cause errors during scanning, another thanks to a problem with its Policy Manager, and a privilege escalation issue thanks to a flaw in on-access scanning. Information on each flaw is provided by Secunia here, here and here, and more information is on the F-Secure lab blog, here.

Authentium's troubles are down to some flawed ActiveX controls used by its product, which can apparently be exploited to gain remote system access and allow drive-by downloads from malicious or infected websites. Another summary from Secunia is here.

All users of both F-Secure and authentium products should be automatically protected by the latest updates, but users are advised to ensure they are running the most up-to-date versions of their security software, with all relevant patches applied.

01 June 2007

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