Symantec, AVG suffer problems

Vulnerabilities and false positives strike major products.

Symantec users have been warned of some serious issues with archive handling, across a wide range of software produced by the company, which could be used to caused denial of service or even breach a system. AVG, meanwhile, has also been hit by a less serious vulnerability, along with a string of reports of false positives.

The Symantec flaws, both involving data checking errors in the Symantec Decomposer module when processing RAR and CAB archives, affects a wide set of the company's security products, including the corporate Symantec Antivirus and home-user Norton ranges, and Brightmail spam filters. Full details of affected products from Symantec are here.

Symantec was first informed of the problems in November, and patches have been released to customers, who should be protected by automatic updates. A Secunia alert, rating the issues 'Highly Critical', is here.

Grisoft has also issued patches for a vulnerability in its AVG product, this time far less severe and only allowing local users to escalate privileges (see a Secunia bulletin here). Developers there have also been kept busy with a series of false positive reports, with problems with SendPhotos and World of Warcraft followed by several recent reports of the product identifying installer components of Google's Desktop Search product as a possible trojan. Both issues are thought to affect both licensed versions and the popular free version of AVG.

As always users are advised to ensure they are running the latest versions of all security software.

13 July 2007

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